Chapter Six

The red sauce-covered crust on my plate suddenly didn’t look appetizing at all.

A sacrifice. Like the hawk-nosed girl and the boy in the well? Had Hayk murdered them for some magic compact with Ullikemi?

“Who is the thunder god?”

“I don’t know,” said Ken. “We need to find out what Hayk’s been up to.” His fingers curled into claws on the counter.

“Is there a Kind association you can get in touch with here? A secret society?” I said.

“The Kind in the United States are scattered, self-governing pockets. They did not centralize like we did in Japan and Europe. There are two big populations—in San Francisco and New York. Neither of them will care much what’s going on here.”

“You mentioned the Council?”

Ken’s eyes narrowed. “No,” he said. Only that one word and it was like he’d slammed a door.

“Well then,” I said. “It’ll have to be the old-fashioned way.” I went back to my laptop and searched for Hayk on the PCC website’s faculty list.

“Mangasar Hayk. Born in Abovyan, Armenia. Surprise, surprise. Professor of Eastern Languages and Linguistics. He’s only been at PCC two years.”

“Where was he before?”

I clicked the research agenda link under his bio. “He’s been a busy, busy beaver. University of Mexico, Frankfurt, even Waseda in Tokyo, University of Queensland, and most recently, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Only a year or two at each location.”

“He’s searching for something,” said Ken.

“For disappearing languages, apparently,” I said. “All his papers in the past ten years are on endangered languages. I scrolled through his list of publications. He’s here in Portland working on the Siletz Dee-ni.”

“What’s ‘Siletz’?” said Ken.

“One of the Pacific Northwest first nation peoples.”

“Like the Ainu in Hokkaido,” said Ken, scratching his chin.

“Wait, there’s a link here for people interested in translating for him,” I said. “He’s got a wish list here for native speakers of certain languages.”

The list was a mix of active and dead links. Herai and another Tohoku dialect were active, as well as the Siletz and Okanagan links. Mayan and Sahaptin were dead.

Like the woman in the hall from Hayk’s fragment. She was a piece of this terrible puzzle. If I could just replay that fragment I might know how she fit in.

Just the idea made my stomach clench. To willingly experience that fragment, dwell in it even on the slight chance some detail could shed light on Hayk’s plan? It would be bathing in evil. If it even worked at all.

“We need more information. If only I’d thought to search his office,” said Ken.

I closed my eyes, shutting out the false brightness of the computer screen.

“I can text a friend back home to see if they know anything about Hayk and Ullikemi, but I think they’ve moved under the radar,” Ken continued. I wasn’t really listening. Ken didn’t need to know what I was doing, especially if I failed.

You can do this. Stay calm. Breathe.

The first brushstroke of the kanji character “ichi,” formed itself in my mind. No. I didn’t want to chase away the fragment, I wanted to experience it. Exhaling in a long stream, I made the kanji fade to gray. The gray deepened in color, and prickles danced across my skin. My entire adult life I’d spent trying to repress fragments during my waking hours. So freeing, and oddly familiar, to let it percolate up through my accumulated layers of filters.

Remember cardamom. Brown-on-black shadows of a darkened hallway. The woman’s pale skin and dark hair, her prominent, hooked nose over a slashed neck still seeping blood. Bloodstained papers like dead leaves scattered on the dirty carpet.

The fragment settled in eagerly, and it was hard to understand how I’d missed its powerful, unhuman vividness before, despite Hayk himself being human. It was other.

Cardamom, then copper flooded my mouth. My tongue ached as if I’d bitten down on it. The fragment swelled into my brain, filling up the small spaces between cells, and then overflowed. It spilled down my spine and into my fingertips and toes.

Buzzing restlessness overwhelmed me, a keen wanting, like the bloated hunger of a ten day fast.

Swallowing down the urgency, I forced the fragment into focus on one of those scattered pages, like a movie camera swiveling in on a close up.

Even obscured with bright red blood-drops, I recognized the rounded-shapes-within-squares of the characters printed on the papers. Not Chinese or Egyptian, but similar. Mayan hieroglyphics. A fat hand beneath rope tied around a sun.

And then in spiky, irregular writing, that could only be Hayk’s; ‘a short time before returning to business.’

What had Hayk said to me when I agreed to come down to his office after Kaneko-sensei’s class?

I’m sure you have a-short-time-before-an-important-errand to lend me, he’d said. And then things went fuzzy, and I had agreed to meet him despite how little I wanted to get near a man who dreamed of murder.

The dead woman was so achingly bright, so clear, I wanted to shut my eyes, but the memory gripped me with ruthlessly tight fingers. She’d been Mayan, I was sure of it. Triumph washed through me, mixing with the buzzing hunger bloating my limbs, strengthening and twisting it into a bitter seething barely contained by my fragile ribcage.

I gagged, tasting bile that burned like acid. I struggled to swallow it down, and it ripped my throat raw with keen-hot edges. The seething settled into an uneasy lump in the vicinity of my belly.

Anger. The uneasy lump burned with the heat of my anger. Hayk was awful, evil, and this horrible fragment was inside me. I wanted it gone!

The lump flared, and a flash of heat went through me, leaving my neck clammy with sweat as it faded.

Gingerly, I flexed toes and fingers which no longer felt like swollen lumps of flesh. Bitterness leached away, my body slowly returning to me like a battered beach abandoned by a receding tidal wave.

I opened my eyes. The cardamom, the dead woman, they were all gone and only traces of the fragment, like a faint pencil outline on blurred paper, remained when I closed my eyes.

Ken’s face hovered very close, his hands, warm and heavy pressed on my clenched fists. Sweat trickled down my spine. Oxygen was having a hard time making it into my lungs despite great gulps of air.

“He gets native speakers of endangered languages to translate for him, and then he murders them,” I said between gasps.

“What did you just do?” He spoke in clipped syllables but his anger was such a pale echo of the seething rage I’d felt gripped in Hayk’s fragment that it hardly registered. “You were frozen, but your eyes jerked crazy underneath your eyelids. You gasped and turned ghost pale. What was it? Ullikemi?”

My insides roiled from the acrid mix of anger and elation still churning inside me from the fragment. This close, awareness of Ken made my skin prickle with a thousand skittering ants. His dark eyes tried to pierce through layers of protection and reach inside me, brow knit with anger. Who does he think he is? Demanding answers like he has any right to tell me what to do?

“Back off!” I said, pushing him away with a hand splayed across his chest. Ken flew back against the refrigerator with a bang, toppling a half-open box of wild-berry granola over to spill out its contents in a steady stream over his head.

For a moment, I felt a kind of triumph. That would teach him to crowd me.

Then, reality sunk in and anger turned to acute embarrassment. “Sorry, sorry,” I said, shaking my head. What was wrong with me?

Ken brushed granola from his hair and rose to his feet in a move more graceful than a granola-covered man had any right to. “You are upset,” he said in a carefully neutral tone. “I was worried you might be under some kind of attack.”

“I tried to call up Hayk’s fragment. I think it was a memory dream, of the woman lying murdered in a hallway.”

“A memory dream?”

“Memory dreams are stronger, more detailed because they’re based in reality,” I said. A faint flush crept to my cheeks. “The fragment I got from you, running in the forest, that was a different kind of dream, foggy, not true memory.”

“Hayk’s fragment revealed something about Ullikemi’s plan?” said Ken. He was now completely clear of granola, but a wild berry still clung to his collar.

I shook my head and reached out to brush the wild berry away. Ken flinched. My mouth went dry. I busied myself sweeping the spilled cereal. He didn’t flinch from the brush of my fingers when I took the dustpan from him.

Maybe I’d misread him?

“I’m sorry,” I said to the closet when I put the broom away.

“Yes, you said that before.” His mouth was still pressed in a firm line.

“This time I’m apologizing for throwing you across my kitchen. I didn’t know I could do that. I can’t do that. How did I do that?”

“I’m not positive,” said Ken. “But you’re Baku. My guess is that by consciously recalling the fragment you took some kind of power into yourself.”

Oh god. “I ate the dream.”

“Possibly.”

Who is the monster, now? I looked over at the sleeping form of Dad on my couch. It was like some mad version of bring-your-daughter-to-work day. Only it wasn’t his sushi business we shared, but this freaky dream-eating thing.

My head felt hot and buzzed like I’d downed a triple-shot mocha, but nothing else seemed different. Did eating evil just make you seriously cranky or were there other, more invisible, things I should worry about?

“It wasn’t you,” said Ken. He kept his arms folded, and sat down on the kitchen bar-stool. Keeping himself from towering over me. Purposefully taking up less space in the small area. “That energy that threw me across the room.”

I spread my palms in front of his face. “Yes it was.”

“No,” he said. “That wasn’t you, that wasn’t your anger or your power. It smells different. Death power, just the faintest echo of blood. No wonder Hayk is bound to Ullikemi.”

“So Hayk researches dead languages, kills translators, and keeps his attack-dragon, Ullikemi, bound up in that Vishap stone in his office, trying to get power enough to destroy the thunder god? Whatever that is.”

“The thunder god is the key to knowing what Hayk will try next. But you’ve got the first part backwards. Hayk is only human. He is Ullikemi’s servant, not the other way around.”

“The thunder gods around here aren’t likely to be Middle Eastern,” I said. I nudged my laptop back to life. Google gave up nothing for the search terms “thunder god, Portland” other than links to a Swedish death metal band’s gig and a gelato shop’s list of coffee names.

When I looked up, Ken was rinsing glasses in the sink. The pizza box was empty. I put a hand on my stomach. Was the leaden weight in there pizza or leftover Hayk-fragment?

Ken jammed the faucet handle closed with a thump. He leaned over my sink, his shoulders hunched, and his hands gripping the side of the sink so tightly I could see the skin turning white around his knuckles.

What did I say? Is he actually angry at getting thrown across the room?

“I didn’t know what I was getting into when I agreed to come here,” he said in that gravelly voice that made the hairs on my arm stand at attention. “No matter what Herai-san made of himself in Portland, it was never my intention to interfere, just to…to convince…”

“I have no clue what you are talking about,” I said curtly. Something about this weirdness had to be clear and straightforward. I got up from the computer, battling irritation and unease in equal measure, but I had nowhere to pace. Dad effectively blocked my living area and the kitchen was too small for Ken. I ended up leaning on the opposite side of the counter, a fist pressed into my side.

The waves of frustration coming off Ken were almost visible.

Good. Why should this be any easier for him? What with all his mystic Kitsune secrets and Council talk.

Ken straightened up to face me. “This wasn’t supposed to be a fight. That’s why they sent me, half—,” he gulped down whatever he was going to say. “Someone who appears non-threatening.”

We were so close, only a breath away. Any movement would spark the tension and set something into motion between us that scared me down to my toes.

Ken’s gaze raked over me, raw and scathing. Fear surged through me. My own? Leftover from Hayk’s fragment? I couldn’t tell.

Not fear, no. An answer to the strength of the emotion in Ken’s voice, to the white-knuckled grip of his hands. His pupils had bled into the whites, darkening his eyes into two slashes of midnight against pale skin.

His face changed. The planes of his cheeks lost the amiable roundness, his eyebrows arched high over those eyes I couldn’t stop staring into.

“I won’t let Hayk hurt you. And not just because of the promise I made to Herai-san.”

“Ken—”

“Just let me,” he said, vaulting over the counter in a blur of motion. “I need some of your simple strength. Something unstained by ghosts,” he finished, standing so close that I felt the warmth of his breath on my face.

I brushed the sides of his arms in a touch meant to be tentative, but as soon as my hands closed on his bare skin, the energy buzzing between us took over. I gripped his elbows and pulled him against me.

“Koi,” he said, his lips brushed my ear while his arms stayed rigid at his sides.

“This feels good.” He pulled back so his gaze could bore into mine. “But last time you pulled away. There was fear.”

Words were barriers. My body ached to move, to feel. My hands gripped his shoulders and kneaded his flesh. Musky kinako enveloped me.

“There’s no fear in me now,” I murmured and reached up to stop his mouth with my own.

When our mouths met Ken held nothing back. His lips opened and a low groan filled his throat. He pulled me deep into his mouth with surging strokes of his tongue, while the firm softness of his lips slid over mine, trying to find the closest possible fit.

Finally, finally. I felt his fingers weave into the hair at my temples, leaving his thumb free to circle the outer edge of my ear in feather-light touches. I gasped for air, rearing back a little and when I tilted my face upward again, Ken kissed the corner of my mouth.

Pulling away? I felt a stab of disappointment that slowly dissolved into tingling awareness as his mouth moved down the column of my throat. He nuzzled the tender skin along the inside of my collarbone, and then carefully tugged the hair band from my ponytail and combed through my hair, his fingers lingering at the top of my chest. He rubbed his face at my neck, inhaling deeply.

The urgency inside me didn’t want these light caresses. I tugged at his shoulders, angling for a kiss, but he pulled back.

His eyes were all darkness now. I lunged in, but he held me still with a gentle pressure at my temples.

Doesn’t he want to…? Certainty fled. The seething I’d felt since experiencing Hayk’s dream slowed to a trickle. I became uncomfortably aware of the garlic on my breath, the slight burn around my lips where his nascent beard had rubbed at me, and the coiled feeling of electricity in the air. Here I was again. Kissing and feeling up a man I’d met the day before. Letting him inside my guard.

A flush burned down my neck. Ken traced a path from my ear to my cheeks with a firm fingertip.

“Here it is again. You’re blushing,” he said quietly. His nostrils flared slightly.

I nodded slowly, feeling tears burning behind my eyes. God. What is wrong with me? His silent regard was too much to bear. I turned my face away. My eyes fell on the muffled hump of my father on the couch. My cheeks burned even more. With Dad right there on the couch!

Ken took a deep breath and let go of my face very slowly, his fingers lingering to brush my cheek and then tucking hair behind my ear.

I shivered at the light touch.

“This isn’t you,” he said, still in the gravelly voice. His features softened a bit, returning to that amiable version I’d met outside Stumptown Coffee yesterday.

“No,” I said, my hand coming up to brush the backs of my fingers against his cheek before my sane voice could interfere. He flinched back, stranding my hand in the tense air between us.

“I mean,” I said clearing my throat and taking a step back. I couldn’t even trust my own body. Hands, stay down. “I mean, you don’t have to use your illusion like that. The other one is your real, um, face, isn’t it?”

Ken nodded. “Ah,” he said. “Yes.” He half-turned away, defenses going up. Transparently brittle. Did I look like that when I talked to Marlin? Readying myself for the next blow?

“They are both me, but I thought this face would help. Be more settling,” he said. His features sharpened, resolving back into the face I had been kissing.

I had been kissing. Him. The Kitsune.

The Koi I thought I was didn’t touch people willingly in an intimate way. He hadn’t tasted of pizza or kinako this time at all, but of something bitter and compelling.

I barely knew him, despite how he’d helped me. My insides felt all jostled up and bruised like a dropped bag of peaches, but I still wanted to touch him. His presence was an ambient hum all along my skin.

If he tried to kiss me again right this moment I’d let him.

This isn’t you, he’d said.

It had been me kissing him, but where was that urgency I had felt just an instant ago? Gone, along with the last dregs of Hayk’s fragment. Maybe crankiness wasn’t the only side-effect of evil-dream eating.

“I think you’re right,” I said, the absence of that restlessness leaving me hollow. The room was suddenly too bright, the lamination on the counter unbearably gray. Great, just what I needed; a headache coming on.

“That my face illusion calmed you?”

“No, that the, uh, kissing part wasn’t me.”

Ken’s jaw went tight. That had stung.

Oops.

“I should have recognized what I felt rising in you wasn’t exactly you,” he said. Back to serious Ken.

“It was like when I threw you against the refrigerator, wasn’t it?” I said.

Ken winced, and then gave a short nod. “Hayk’s fragment.”

“So Baku eat dreams and become violent and sexual?”

Ken went all grave and gloomy. “I wish I had answers, Koi. Unfortunately, I just don’t know.” He waved in the direction of the couch. “Your father is the one with the Baku answers.”

Dad. He always had these blackout-like periods after an episode, but never this long.

I pressed thumbs to the place where my neck joined my skull. The headache had arrived and made itself at home.

When the room’s awful brightness had dimmed, I went to kneel beside the couch. Dad hadn’t changed position at all. Breath tickled the back of my knuckles when I put them to his face, but his chest barely moved.

“Is something wrong?” said Ken from the kitchen.

“Dad?” I said, poking at his cheek. The stubbly beard growth rasped my skin. “This isn’t natural sleep.”

“Can you wake him?”

I grasped his shoulders. An ache started in my chest at how thin and fragile those shoulders felt under my hands. Shaking him got no reaction. “I don’t think so.” My throat tightened.

Ken came over to the couch and laid a hand against Dad’s forehead. “No fever.”

“I should call Dr. Brown. Marlin just made me write that phone number down,” I stood up, scraping my shin on the couch. “Where’s my phone?”

“Wait a moment,” said Ken. He leaned over the back of the couch until his nose touched Dad’s. He inhaled deeply. “This might not be entirely organic in origin.”

“What?”

“Herai-san smells of the same energy that was inside you. And there’s a trace of something else…an energy maybe of this place? Can you enter his sleep like you do the dreams?” said Ken.

I came back to the couch. “I don’t know.” Frustration made my tone sharp. “I’ve never gotten fragments from Dad. Never. I don’t even know how to begin.”

“You’ve never had a fragment from a Kind before today, have you?”

I shook my head, even as we both realized that was wrong. I had experienced Kind fragments before. “Hayk’s fragment. That murder dream was more vivid, more urgent than anything I’d felt before.”

“Ullikemi’s power inhabits Hayk’s fragments by their bond.”

“That’s why I couldn’t repress them during the day? Unlike fragments from normal people.” As if I didn’t have enough to worry about already. I thought I’d at least conquered keeping fragments out of my waking life. But Kind fragments were a whole new kettle of awesome-sauce fish.

“Okay,” said Ken. “Well then, there’s no other choice.”

“No other choice?” I repeated.

“The reasons I came to Portland are complicated,” he said in a firm tone that did not invite questions. “To get permission to come, I had to make certain promises to the Kind here that I wouldn’t make waves. But this,” he swallowed something slowly and deliberately. His next words came out in a too-carefully even tone. “This Ullikemi thing is not a result of my actions. It is connected to Herai-san. That could put us all in danger.”

Was he trying to convince me or himself? The dull ache in my head made it hard to think. Maybe Ken was wrong about this not being organic.

My jacket! That’s where my phone was. Ken stopped me with a hand on my arm. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to call Marlin.” I shook off his hand.

“Wait,” he said. “It’s dangerous to drag your sister into this.”

“My Dad is in a coma!” I said.

“If Hayk and Ullikemi are behind this, nothing you or your sister can do will help,” said Ken. For a second, I hated him, hated the whole Kitsune, Baku, dragon bag of craziness. It meant I could do nothing for Dad by myself.

“So what do you suggest we do?”

Ken ran both hands through his hair, killing the tired mousse completely. Hair fell across his forehead in a droopy-cute wave. My fingers itched to push it to the side.

“Call Kwaskwi.”

“Excuse me?”

“You asked before if I had contacts with the Kind here. I do have a local contact. Kwaskwi.”

“Who?”

Ken gave me a considering look. “He’s a first peoples Kind. Pacific Northwest tribes have legends about him.”

I tried to imagine what a Native American Kind would be like. It was hard enough getting my mind around Ken. No, that wasn’t true. There wasn’t a bit of Ken my mind hadn’t been around yet.

A bit of my blush returned. I ducked my head so Ken wouldn’t see. The sudden movement made my temples throb.

I was fiending for ibuprofen.

“How is that going to help us?”

“Kwaskwi’s got access to resources. He’s kind of a spokesperson for the Portland area. We’re going to need more than just your Google skills to help us figure out what drew Hayk here. What Ullikemi thinks the thunder god is.”

“I see. And meanwhile I just let Dad slumber away?”

“He isn’t showing signs of distress; his heartbeat and breathing are steady. His skin is dry and cool. Let me talk to Kwaskwi first.”

“Fine.”

Ken’s hand rose in the air like he meant to touch me. I held my breath, but he pulled it back, taking the motion with him as he turned away. In the space of a few minutes we’d gone from angry to hot to tense. I let my breath go in a slow, steady stream.

Ken spent a few minutes on the phone speaking in a mix of English and a language I’d never heard before. He gave little bows even over the phone, an ingrained Japanese physical response that reminded me of Dad.

“Kwaskwi wants to meet us,” said Ken, slipping his DoCoMo cell into a side pocket. Too controlled and precise, like he was wound so tight any sudden movement would make something come unraveled.

“Us?”

“Yes. He made meeting you a condition. An hour from now, at the Mt. Hood viewpoint at the top of Hoyt Arboretum. I assume you know where that is.”

“What? He doesn’t like Starbucks? We can’t take Dad to the Arboretum like this and there’s no chance I’m going to leave him alone.”

“Call your sister.” A new timbre entered Ken’s voice, that of command.

I glared at him. “What happened to ‘it’s too dangerous to drag her into this’?”

“We need Kwaskwi to deal with Hayk. There are only a few places he’s willing to meet, and Hoyt arboretum was the closest one. He’s somewhat…tricky. Marlin and Herai-san should be fine for just a few hours. It’s possible that you did eat that fragment.”

“So?”

Ken shot me a sideways look. “So it’s possible Hayk and Ullikemi will be slightly less aggressive for a few hours.”

He knew more than he was letting on. But I couldn’t dwell on that. The headache was a blossom, unfurling spikes of pain through my temples and at the nape of my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut for a second and felt a wave of vertigo. Ken’s hands were instantly at my elbows, supporting me.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just a really bad headache. A few ibuprofen will make me fine,” I said, wishing I could lean into him like my body was telling me to do.

Not a good idea. I shuffled away.

Ken let me go. There it was again, that impression he was controlling simmering anger or frustration. A muscle ticked in his jaw.

Angry at me? For getting him mixed up in something he wasn’t supposed to handle?

I made a beeline for the medicine cabinet and dry swallowed three of the orange pills. Dialing Marlin’s number, I saw that Ken had taken a seat in front of my laptop. He glanced at me for permission.

I nodded, impatiently drumming my fingers on the counter as Marlin’s phone rang and rang. I hung up and speed-dialed her number again. No answer. Maybe she was with a client? I texted her.

Need U. Urgent.

I peered over Ken’s shoulder. He was Googling nearby businesses.

“What are you looking for?”

“Dentalia.”

“Teeth?” I said.

“No, a kind of shell. A mollusk shell that looks like a tusk. Native peoples used it as currency long ago.”

“What? Kwaskwi demands a tribute?” I said. Why didn’t Marlin text me back? Usually she was freakishly responsive.

“Something like that,” he said over his shoulder to me.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

Ken mumbled something in response that I didn’t quite catch. My phone had buzzed and I was reading the incoming text message.

Ur sister speaks Herai 2.

“Oh God,” I said. The text was from Marlin’s cell.