I passed my house and kept riding to the secret bamboo grove.
“What are you?” I demanded, ducking under the kaki tree.
Moya looked up at me. “A girl.”
“What kind of girl?”
“I don’t think I like your tone, Koda.”
“Well, I don’t like vans driving over my face!”
“First,” Moya said, “it didn’t drive over you. Your head would have popped like a grape if it had. Second, how did you not see a van trying to hit you through a convenience store window? A van. It didn’t exactly sneak up on you.”
“To be fair, I wasn’t watching for runaway vans. I was inside a building!”
“A building with windows. That’s what windows were invented for.”
Moya reached out and patted the grass. “Sit down, Koda. You’re hyperventilating.”
“I was riding my bike very intensely. Are you trying to kill me, Moya?”
She looked up at me. And then laughed.
“I’m serious, Moya. If my girlfriend is trying to murder me, I think I have a right to know.”
“Ah, you think I’m your girlfriend.”
“That was totally not the point! And no, I don’t think you’re my girlfriend. I don’t know why I said that. I was probably thinking of someone else.”
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Well, you don’t have to break up with me.” I dropped onto the grass obediently.
“No, I just want to talk. See, there is someone trying to kill you. But don’t worry, it’s not me.”
“Okay, this is worse than a breakup.”
“Did you see the crows, Koda? Out in the parking lot before the van veered off the road?”
I nodded. They forced Natsuki to cut her smoking break short.
“Think back to every interaction you’ve had with the Yamabuki Three. Did you see the crows then?”
The flock that flew after Aiko. The cries in the math room. The birds taking off with Taiki.
“Crows and tengu have a long history together. The very first tengu were karasu-tengu—small humanoids with beaks and claws and crow wings. Then came the mountain tengu—fallen humans that the Road had corrupted until their skin had turned red and their noses had grown ridiculously long. Kusaka Town is sick, Koda. But the crows are just a symptom, not the disease.”
“Who is behind the crows?” I asked.
“Not so much a ‘who’ anymore,” she said. “More of a ‘what.’” Moya picked a blade of grass and held it up to the last rays of the setting sun. “The Seven Noble Families first entered Kusaka Valley two hundred years ago, but they weren’t the only ones here. A powerful tengu called Kōtenbō led a clan of demons in the mountains above them. They had a war and all the tengu disappeared. Almost all of them, anyway.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” I said.
“What would you have done,” she asked, “if I’d walked up to you in a parking lot and asked you to mind-loot the location of a river troll so we could fight a mountain demon together?”
“I’d have called the police.”
“Because…”
“I’d have thought you were clearly a danger to yourself and those around you.”
“I thought it best to take baby steps. At least until I knew for sure that you were one of the good ones.”
“Why would Kōtenbō stay in Kusaka?” I asked with resignation.
“Hate. Revenge. Spite. He is the source of the Tengu Road in this town. He is the magnet that’s drawing it here. As long as he’s hiding in this valley, the sickness will remain.”
“If this tengu is behind the crows, why would he go after Aiko, or Ichiro, or Taiki? What did they ever do to him?”
“Aiko Fujiwara. Ichiro Kobayashi. Taiki Watanabe. C’mon, Koda, don’t you know anything about your town’s history?”
I shrugged.
“Inari, goddess of light, do you ever pay attention in class?”
“If I like the subject, I pay very close attention.”
“But since there aren’t many high school Pokémon classes…”
“I do not often pay attention.”
“Fujiwara, Kobayashi, and Watanabe are three of the noble families.”
“Wait a minute.”
“Here we go.”
“Stuff we learn in school…”
“Almost there.”
“… has real-world applications!”
“Yatta! You did it, dum-dum.” Moya leaned back against the trunk of the kaki tree. “Kōtenbō is hiding out somewhere, so he uses the crows to break into his victims’ minds. And the lingering Tengu Road is the side effect. Think of it like muddy footprints left behind when a thief leaves a house. Only these prints seep into your brain floor and infect everything they touch. The Road spreads through your mind, replacing happiness with fear and despair and loneliness. Kōtenbō needs the crows to control people, but he knows that in order to destroy his victims, all he has to do is nudge them onto the Road.”
“How do we stop that nudge?” I asked.
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Moya said. “But we can cut off the source. The kappa Shibaten is the first step. If we find Shibaten, I think we can find Kōtenbō.”
“But no one’s seen Shibaten for two hundred years.”
“Yori’s obsession with Shibaten would have piqued the kappa’s interest. I thought it would have been enough to draw the troll out of his hiding spot.”
I looked out at my bicycle in the dimming light and the murder evidence tossed so nonchalantly in its basket.
“You’re sure you weren’t trying to kill me with a van?” I said.
She smiled. “About as opposite as you can get, Koda. With the help of the crows, that driver temporarily took leave of his senses and tried to park his vehicle on your skull. I bumped him off course a bit.”
“With a fireball?”
She shrugged. “We all bump in our own way.”
Moya leaned forward and took my hand. She laid her head on my shoulder, and together we watched the sunlight disappear from the bamboo grove around us. It felt nice to be with Moya like this. It could have just been the sweet glow that comes from realizing your girlfriend isn’t trying to murder you, but it felt good. Maybe Moya was my zenko fox spirit after all.
The sky grew dark and a little cold. It reminded me that there was one nagging question that I simply had to ask. “Who is Seimei?”
Moya’s hand stiffened. “You promised you would never steal from me,” she whispered.
“I didn’t mean to,” I answered. “I don’t know how this whole suri thing works.”
Moya pulled away from me. She hugged her knees and looked down at the ground. “How much have you seen?” she asked.
“I saw the park,” I started. “I know what Kōtenbō did to Seimei’s parents. I know you saved him.”
Moya dropped her head lower. “I watched them die,” she said in a small voice. “His father was being hunted by Kōtenbō, but his mother’s death was a mistake.”
“The Nakagawas were one of the noble families,” I ventured. “But Seimei’s mother wasn’t from that line?”
Moya shook her head. “With her last breath she called on the goddess Inari to save the life of her son. Inari granted her request. She let me come down to protect him.”
“I saw all of that, Moya. But what happened next?” I asked.
She looked over at me with swollen eyes. “I failed, Koda. That’s what happened next.”
Tears rolled down Moya’s cheeks. But instead of, you know, normal human tears, they dissolved into smoke, leaving black streaks down her face. I wanted to press her about the explosion at Ōmura Shrine, but if you’re wondering when it’s a good time to give a girl space—it’s probably when she starts crying smoke.
“I think you should go,” she said.
I slowly pushed up to my feet. Moya dropped her head onto her knees.
“I’ll see myself out,” I said, ducking under the branches of the kaki tree.