CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Pon-suma woke me at some ungodly hour of the morning. There was a flurry of hasty packing and irritated confabs. Meanwhile I confirmed that I was still blind, and the flame-kernel inside me was entirely dead, aching, and cold. Then Pon-suma trundled me and Dad into the back of the van he’d used to kidnap us ages ago. The front passenger door opened and shut and Pon-suma grunted.

“I’ll get you there,” said Ben, and then the van’s engines started.

“Don’t use this arm until you see a doctor in Portland,” said Midori. “You need a cast.” She must have been standing outside the open doors of the van. I nodded in her direction.

“And you,” she said next, “try to keep off that leg for at least one day.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Ken. His voice, suddenly emanating from the front corner of the van when I’d no idea he was even there set my heart racing. Great. Relationship goalz. Locked in a van for hours with my comatose father and a broken Kitsune. This is not what I would have chosen for my last day in Japan. I hadn’t walked the scramble crosswalks in Shinjuku, or ambled the gravel path under towering cypress to Meiji Shrine, or sat at a mom-and-pop stall at Tsukiji fishmarket at six a.m. eating insanely fresh sea urchin and salmon roe rice bowl.

Instead, I ate evil and released the dragon. No sushi for me this time. Just a tender spot where I thought I’d been carefully building friendship and intimacy. My chest hurt like my ribs were trying to knit together over a tenderized heart. I sucked in a constricted breath and was mortified to hear it leaving in a shudder.

“Here.” I held out my phone in the direction of Ken’s voice. “Has Marlin replied?” Let him think my emotional breakdown was entirely for Marlin. Which it was. Entirely.

The van doors slammed and Ben revved the engine. “No,” said Ken, “I’m sorry. No texts. No voicemails. And I’ve tried calling Kwaskwi three or four times.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I won’t tell you it will be okay,” said Ken.

“I wouldn’t have believed you if you had.”

“Will you believe anything I say now?” Ken touched my good wrist with a gently insistent grip that would not allow me to jerk away. A porcelain mug was placed in my hand, warm on the bottom from the hot liquid bathing my face with notes of burnt sugar steam.

“Oh my god,” I said, and took a sip. It was the bitter richness of Enoshima’s coffee. “How did you do this?”

“Kitsune magic,” said Ken. We turned a corner roughly, and he steadied the coffee by cupping my hand with both of his.

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. The fresh scent of ferns, and the cool mist of a forest caressed my face. Inside me, a little flame leapt to a weakly flickering, pale yellow life. I was still blind, even in this fragment. Ken’s fragment. But I was also still Baku, it seemed. So I would heal, after all. And maybe Ken would have something to do with that.

Too soon, the sensations faded away.

“Probably not,” I said. He kept his hands on mine. I waited, frozen, but for the taste and warmth of black gold slowly melting the stiff cage around my heart.

Ken sighed, and his hands dropped away. “Not Kitsune magic?”

“Not believe anything you say,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t prove yourself with actions.”

“You’ll give me another chance?” Somehow I was a hundred percent sure there was a crooked grin and an arched eyebrow on his face.

“For coffee this good, you can even sit next to me on the plane.”

From the front of the van came Pon-suma’s low chuckle, and then we were driving toward the south. Toward an airplane that would take me back to Portland—and home.

***

 

Want to be the first to know about the next book in the Portland Hafu series? Join the World Weaver Press newsletter. And turn the page for more on The Last Dream of Her Mortal Soul, book 3 of the Portland Hafu series.