CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Darkness. Complete and utter darkness. My eyes were open, but I couldn’t see a thing. My heart pounded rapidly, and a strange awareness prickled over my skin as if I were hyperaware of air currents.

I am dreaming.

The delicious, nutty richness of roasting coffee beans filled my nose with each inhale. The flavor coated my tongue like sipping freshly roasted coffee. A warm blanket of peacefulness descended. The darkness was not fearful at all, but strangely alive with possibility and shaped by unseen energy currents.

Coffee. Darkness. This is Enoshima’s fragment.

I startled awake with a massive flinch like jumping backwards off a cliff and hitting bottom—every muscle in my body clenched in charlie horse agony for a brief instant. My ragged pony tail stuck to my clammy neck, and my heart pounded a drum line competition beat.

Where am I? I propped myself up on an elbow, frantically trying to find meaning in the steep shadows of the thatched ceiling and the musty-smelling futon underneath. My bladder broadcast a message of bloated urgency. Half a gray-mottled moon, fuzzy like mothwings, loomed in the sky visible through a low window. The shack. That’s right.

I put a fist to my heart, pressing firmly to slow the drumbeat, and sat all the way up, untangling what felt like a terry cloth towel from my midsection. The last thing I remembered was falling asleep at the kotatsu table.

Underneath the window to my right, Kwaskwi lay half-naked on a futon with arms stretched out like wings, his sculpted chest gleaming faintly in the moonlight.

“Koi.”

I gave a startled yeep. Ken sat at the table eating a rice ball, hair gelled into perfect, upright spikes, dressed in jeans and an un-bloodstained gray Henley open at the throat. He arched an eyebrow and finished off the last bite, licking his fingers free of sticky rice bits.

“What?” I managed to gasp.

“You look a little frazzled,” he said in his slightly accented English.

“You’re sitting up?”

Ken put a finger to his lips and gave a melodramatic glance at Kwaskwi. I gave him the Marlin death-glare, eyes wide. My body was coming down from full panic mode and I really, really needed to find that outhouse, but the boy had serious explaining to do.

“Come outside,” he whispered and stood. Stood! He obviously favored his right leg, hopping along to the genkan in a painful-looking way. I grabbed my phone and shuffled after in the unreal-feeling moonlight, the tatami rough on my bare feet. I half-slipped on my sneakers, heels crushing the backs, as I followed Ken out the door. It was chilly, I wished I had my cardigan. Ken was definitely limping and after a moment’s search, he hopped off the path, leaned over, and picked up a sturdy branch. With his makeshift cane he surged forward on the path.

“You have two broken legs.”

Ken stopped, turned around and looked down at me, eyes shrouded in moonshadows and inscrutable in the darkness. “Outhouse or Museum?” he said.

“Museum, of course. Don’t dodge my question.”

“Kitsune illusion.”

I grabbed the crook of his elbow. His skin was as hot as a kotatsu heater turned on full blast through the Henley sleeve. “You faked broken legs? How is that even possible? Wouldn’t the other Kitsune have seen through it?”

Ken started walking again, tugging me along like a broken children’s toy. “Midori isn’t able to inhabit her Kitsune self, Pon-suma is oblivious, and Yukiko-sama doesn’t care.”

“You fooled me, too.”

“Yes, surprisingly,” he said gravely.

“You made Ben give you a blood transfusion!”

“Actually, that I needed. I lost a lot of blood.”

The museum’s cement walls and incongruous white church steeple reared up suddenly before us. Outside lights clustered over the doorway were abuzz with clouds of flying insects I hoped weren’t mosquitos. Crickets or locusts thrummed loudly in the grass.

Inside the building it was dark. Everyone was asleep. Still, I felt the need to tiptoe to Ken’s obvious amusement.

I let go of Ken’s arm and turned down the corridor leading to the restroom. A bright green exit sign and that crazy moon provided enough light that there was no need to flip the light switch. I bee-lined for the blessedly Western-style toilet at the end of a row of Japanese squatter stalls. Relaxing on the electrically warmed seat melted away the last vestiges of sudden waking panic.

The toilet flushed automatically when I stood, the loud sound making me flinch. Ken had fooled us all into thinking he was heavily wounded, but more importantly, had fooled me. I mentally swatted away implications about not realizing your love interest was faking broken legs. Clueless, taken to a new level.

What about the parts where he was supposedly unconscious? I replayed the conversation I’d had with Kwaskwi last evening, squinting into the mirror. Had I said anything I’d regret Ken hearing? I pulled the band from my ponytail in a painful clump of broken, sweat-tangled hair. I finger combed my hair loose around my shoulders, unable to see more than a dark blob in the mirror.

When I returned to the corridor, Ken had magically conjured up lattes in a cardboard drink carrier. “Peace offering?”

“Those better not be illusion, too, asshole.”

“I don’t have a death wish,” he said. “We have to get going.”

“Going? Where? Hell to the no. First you tell me why you were playing wounded martyr. I wasted guilt on you.”

Ken handed me the drink carrier so he could give me a one-armed shoulder squeeze. Just like the very first time he’d ever touched me in front of Marlin’s apartment back home, a warm wash of heat enveloped me, tinged with the illicit excitement of physical connection after a lifetime of avoiding human touch.

“Trust me, Koi,” he whispered, breath missing its usual delicious kinako scent, but making my toes curl with its familiar bitterness. “I’ll explain everything in the truck.”

“Truck?” I hesitated. I was no fool. He knew what effect sudden touches had on me. Should I trust him? Something hinky was going on here. I didn’t want to believe I was being hoodwinked into something, but then again, he could make me believe anything, apparently.

“The Council will return in a few hours. They will take your father back to Tokyo just to keep him far away from the Black Pearl. It’s unlikely they’ll leave you here, too. This is our only chance.”

“Chance?” God, I was repeating words like an airhead ingénue in an action flick, but things were moving too fast for me to keep up.

“To release the Black Pearl.”