18

YUNA’S STORY

My wife grew up in a house of magic, but it wasn’t like a kid’s movie,” Jerry said. “Her father was some kind of Japanese sorcerer, and Yuna thought roses grew wherever he walked. He wasn’t around much, but he wasn’t cruel to begin with, or if he was she didn’t know it. He was some kind of priest…”

“What kind of priest?” I interrupted.

He understood why I was asking. “Yuna would never be specific. He wasn’t any kind of priest by the time she was grown anyhow, and she didn’t want me trying to track him down. Whatever you call him, he was into some weird stuff. They lived in a house on the side of Mount Fuji, near a shrine that he was keeping up, and their place didn’t look like much. That humble abode exterior was all a sham though. The inside of the house was a lot bigger than the outside, and it was full of all kinds of treasures and servants.”

“Did your wife ever use the word onmyouji?” Sarah asked.

Jerry didn’t blink. I’m not sure he’d blinked the entire time he was there, though that’s supposed to be impossible. “Yes.”2

Sarah nodded and gestured for him to continue.

“The house was full of those sliding paper doors.” Jerry paralleled his hands and made a sliding gesture. “But if you went in them in a different order, they’d open up to different rooms. Like that toy that had different colored squares on it. You could turn the rows around to make different color combinations.…”

“A Rubik’s Cube, Dad.” Kevin sounded a little impatient, and it made me like Jerry more. If Kevin felt free to take that kind of attitude, maybe Jerry wasn’t a martinet.

“The house was like a Rubik’s Cube, then. Except instead of different colors, you could make different… spaces. It was full of servants too. Faceless servants.” Jerry’s expression became full of distaste. “I don’t mean faceless like no one noticed them, either. They really had no faces.”

“Noppera-bō,” Sarah said under her breath. Jerry paused and looked at her. She explained. “This man was binding a kind of ghost and making them serve him.”

“Was that evil?” Kevin asked.

“Yes,” Sig said.

Sarah looked troubled. “Some farmers put baby calves in a confined space so that they can barely move—the farmers don’t want them developing tough muscle. These beings spend their entire lives alone in darkness, unable to move. Then they’re slaughtered. We call that veal. Is the farmer evil?”

“No,” Jerry said.

“People disagree,” Sarah said tersely. “Personally, I think the man does an unspeakably cruel thing, but he doesn’t think of himself as an evil man, and some people agree with him. He’s not breaking any laws.”

“Maybe we should avoid talking about political hot topics,” I suggested. “At least while there’s a powerful cunning man trying to kill us.”

Sarah’s lips quirked. “It wasn’t a very good metaphor anyhow. Noppera-bō aren’t helpless calves, Kevin. Wrong or not, what your grandfather was doing was dangerous and arrogant.”

Jerry decided the interruption was over. “My wife grew up like a princess. These faceless servants made her meals for her, prepared her baths, brought her clothes. But she felt useless. Her father wanted a son, and when that didn’t happen he made it clear that Yuna would give him grandsons.”

“So Yuna didn’t have any brothers or sisters?” I asked.

Jerry shook his head. “No. Her only friend when she was a child was the being who looked after her.”

“What do you mean by being?” Sig asked.

Jerry regarded her expressionlessly. “I mean, a woman who could turn into a fox with four tails.”

Sig and Sarah and I all exchanged glances. Holy shit. The onmyouji had enslaved a kitsune, a kind of were-fox, except that kitsune aren’t humans who turn into foxes… they are magical foxlike beings who can make themselves look human.

“When did things go bad?” I asked.

Jerry almost looked at me approvingly then. “When Yuna’s mother couldn’t have any more children. Her father got more and more angry and started treating Yuna’s mother like there was something wrong with her. Yuna had started going to school by then. They were a real family, you understand? They were a part of the world.”

“Why didn’t you or Mom ever tell me any of this, Dad?” Kevin looked like he was working up a good case of hurt outrage.

“Just listen,” Jerry said gravely. “Yuna’s mother began acting strange. She told Yuna that they might take a trip very soon, but that Yuna shouldn’t tell anyone. It was a surprise. And then one day, Yuna’s mother disappeared. Her father told Yuna that her mother had run off with another man. He was so angry, he barely seemed like the same person. He told Yuna that she couldn’t go into any parts of the house where the mother used to spend time. Then he did his magic with sliding doors and somehow made that part of the house disappear.”

Son of a bitch. Hocus-pocus, abracadabra, childhood begone!

“Yuna didn’t know what to think. Her father was so scary that Yuna was afraid to ask him questions. But a lot of her favorite clothes were missing.”

Sig got it immediately. “The mother had packed Yuna’s bags. She planned to take Yuna along.”

“Yes.” Jerry’s face was grim. “The father had never been around much, but he began leaving the house more and more and acting like a stranger when he was there. Then one day, when a faceless servant was pouring Yuna her tea, Yuna saw a scar on the faceless servant’s index finger. A scar that Yuna recognized.”

He hadn’t said anything about a scar before, but this wasn’t a story to Jerry. This wasn’t something to tell artfully or lace with foreshadowing and irony. Jerry’s voice became clogged with some deep emotion. “It was her mother’s hand. Yuna’s mother was dead and had been turned into a faceless servant.”

“Goddess,” Sarah breathed.

“My wife had a breakdown,” Jerry said simply. “She tried to leave, but some of the faceless servants dragged Yuna through rooms that she had never seen before. After they left her, Yuna tried to get out, but the house was like a maze. She tried to rip through the paper in the walls, but something always stopped her.”

“It was her father’s place of power,” Sarah said ruefully.

“Yuna tried to find her way out, but no matter how many different combinations she tried, the sliding doors always led her back to where she started.” Jerry paused as if he was hearing what he was saying out loud for the first time and realizing how crazy it sounded.

I gave him a little prod. “And then the father came home?”

Jerry looked down at his hands. “Yes. He didn’t deny killing Yuna’s mother. He told Yuna that her mother had become involved with another man and that there were things going on that Yuna didn’t understand but that someday she would. She yelled and cried, but he just left her there again.”

“How did Mom escape?” Kevin’s whole body was tense. He looked miserable.

“It was the fox woman.” Jerry looked a lot like his son. “One night during one of her father’s absences, Yuna woke up and saw the fox sitting on the floor, staring at her. It spoke inside her head somehow and told Yuna to be quiet and follow her. When it walked, doors slid open for it. It didn’t lead Yuna back out of the house, though. It led her to a room with nothing but a Japanese sword on a pedestal.”

“This sounds like a fairy tale.” Kevin wasn’t complaining so much as shaken. “Why wouldn’t this fox woman just stay in human form?”

“Maybe staying in its true form helped it resist whatever hold the onmyouji had on her,” I offered.

Jerry looked at me, but only because his eyes didn’t have anywhere in particular to go. “My wife wanted to use the sword to kill herself, but when she drew it, the sword spoke to her. It told my wife that it held the spirits of Yuna’s ancestors.”

Kevin made a sound that was at least half admiration, and Jerry gave him a warning glance. “It sounds wrong to me, but I was born and raised in Pittsburgh. Native Japanese people have a different attitude about spirits than we do, especially family spirits.”

Sig looked at me. “You lived there for a few years. What do you think? Was this sword holding echoes or living souls?”

I shrugged. “Japan has more than one belief system, and I’m a gaijin. Stories about objects holding kami are everywhere, and as far as I can tell, the attitude toward those kinds of spirits generally seems to be that they aren’t trapped… that our ancestors are everywhere in everything all the time anyway.”

“Like atoms,” Kevin said. “Except holy.”

“Or unholy,” Sig commented darkly.

I shrugged again. “Either way, spirits who had sacrificed themselves for their family would be royally pissed off at someone who wanted to sacrifice his family for himself.”

“I don’t think the sword was evil. Yuna’s father was keeping it hidden because his ancestors had rejected him,” Jerry said reluctantly. Then he nodded at me. “Like the werewolf said, they were pissed. The spirits told my wife that they’d cursed her father so that he couldn’t have any more children and she was in danger because of it.”

I leaned forward. “Wait a minute. This is important. Did his ancestors do this because the guy had killed his children before? Has he been doing this for a while?”

Jerry nodded his head. “Yes. Yuna’s father had been having children with different women and killing them so that he could steal their youth, but I don’t know for how long. That’s why his ancestors made him sterile. The curse caught him completely off guard too. Yuna was his last child. If he killed her, he wouldn’t be able to sacrifice another heir.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I argued. “He wouldn’t be trying to kill Kevin if all this was true. He’d be trying to take him prisoner and start a new breeding farm.”

“Kevin?” Sarah said abruptly. The blood had completely drained from Kevin’s face.

“Kevin?” Jerry’s tone was sharper.

“I’m a sperm donor,” Kevin whispered.

Nobody said anything. The statement had come out of nowhere, and it was so unlikely and so unexpected that it was hard to take in.

“Kevin?” This time Jerry’s tone was a warning.

“My friend Max talked me into it. We started last year,” Kevin said miserably. “I’ve been putting aside money to go to Vegas. I figured I could use my… gift… there, but I needed a stake, and there wasn’t any place around that would pay for my blood…”

“Just stop,” Jerry commanded. He was breathing rapidly through his nose though I’m not sure anyone else could hear it. He did that for maybe forty seconds before saying, flatly, to his son, “You’ve disappointed me on so many levels I don’t know where to start.”

“That’s how the onmyouji found out about you!” Sarah exclaimed, then put a hand over her mouth.

“What are you talking about?” Jerry’s voice became dangerously tight.

“Some of the onmyouji’s divination spells would have been geared to tracking his own bloodline,” Sarah said reluctantly. “Like calls to like. Yuna warded you and Kevin, but if some woman used Kevin’s sperm to grow an unwarded baby with the onmyouji’s DNA…”

“Can we just stop?!” Kevin’s face had gone dark with rushing blood. His father was looking at him as if seeing him through a sniper scope.

I wanted to say that there was nothing morally wrong with sperm donors, or mention that Kevin was nineteen, even if he seemed to be an introspective and decent and smart nineteen. But it was Kichida family business, so what I said instead was: “So, one of the grandfather’s divination spells finally gets a hit, and he finds some pregnant American woman with his DNA growing inside her and no father. He would have wanted the father, right?”

“Yes,” Sarah said.

“So, the grandfather does a little more digging and he finds out the American woman got her sperm from a clinic,” I reasoned. “Kevin being a sperm donor would have been like a dream come true for this guy. A whole bumper crop of future breeding stock that he could keep in a freezer.”

“John…” Sarah started, but I kept going.

“Just listen for a minute,” I insisted. “This whole kill-Kevin thing only makes sense if those sperm donations have been bought up or stolen. The onmyouji has to wait for his descendants to be young adults before he can sacrifice them, right? And this guy has been getting older for at least twenty years now and it’s probably been driving him crazy. Or crazier. He wants to kill Kevin so he’ll live long enough to harvest the next crop of his DNA.”

“Excuse me!” Sig spoke the polite phrase in a rude way that kind of negated the effect. “Could we please finish the story before one of the Kichidas has a heart attack? Your wife was holding her family sword, Jerry.”

It took a little more coaxing, but Jerry eventually agreed that he and his son needed to talk in private later and got back to his narrative, though he was clearly distracted. “My wife didn’t know how to use the sword, but when she held it, it… she said it wasn’t like it possessed her. She said she was still her, but the sword moved through her like electricity. She said that doors opened for it, and the sword guided her through the halls of that house, cutting down paper lanterns and setting fires behind them. Some of the faceless servants tried to stop her, but the sword cut them down. When my wife finally found herself outside on the mountain, her family home was burning behind her. The sword wanted to track down and kill Yuna’s father, but Yuna dropped the sword and ran away.”

She dropped the sword? I guess she was a freaked-out and traumatized teenager, but that still made me stifle a groan.

“But how did she get to Okinawa?” Kevin protested, then clearly regretted it when his father returned his attention back to Kevin with a look that made him flinch.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jerry said curtly. “The Army sent me there because I looked and spoke Japanese and some idiot in Military Intelligence thought I could actually pass for a native. And then I agreed to take some friends to a hospitality house and interpret for them, and I met your mother there. She was using some of the things she’d learned in her father’s house to keep accounts and tell fortunes and practice feng shui.”

“So, she wasn’t a…” Kevin faltered.

“No!” Jerry’s face darkened. “I wanted to kill some time there because I wasn’t going to…”

Jerry looked at his son and halted. I wondered if he was telling the truth, but I can’t say I really cared one way or the other. “We get it,” I said.

Jerry gritted his teeth. “Yuna told my fortune. She said I was going to come back to see her again. And she was right. I knew it the second I met her. And I’d never even dated a Japanese-American girl before, much less a native Japanese one. My parents and I used to fight about that. But I knew.”

“There’s still something you haven’t told us, Mr. Kichida,” Sig noted. “What is this onmyouji’s name?”

“I don’t know,” Jerry admitted.

I considered killing him despite my promise to Sarah.

“My wife refused to tell me,” he elaborated. “She was afraid that I would do something stupid. She wouldn’t even tell me her real name. I loved my wife, and she loved me, but she would have divorced me or killed herself before she told me that. She said that me not knowing his name helped her hide us from him.”

Jerry looked down at his hands. They had become fists, very tight fists. “I never knew my own wife’s real name.”

“There’s something else you haven’t told us,” I said. “How did you know this onmyouji was after you after all this time? Why did he focus on you at all?”

“When I was a sniper, I interacted with men who were in Military Intelligence a lot,” Jerry said. “A week ago an old acquaintance told me that someone was making unofficial inquiries about me.”

“That’s when you set up your trap and told Kevin to go hide or hang out in public places?” Sig asked.

“No,” Jerry said. “That’s when I asked my friend to find out who was asking questions.”

“And what did he find out?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Jerry said bitterly. “Two days ago, a man from the NSA contacted me. My friend had gone missing, and they were questioning all of the people that he had recently been in touch with. Even then, I didn’t assume it was Yuna’s father. I thought he was probably dead by now. I don’t know if you know much about how the spy world works, but my friend could have made up that story about someone asking about me because he wanted to manipulate me into killing someone for him off the books. Or he wanted me to think I owed him a favor. And if he was doing something complicated or shady, it could have backfired.”

I actually understood that completely. “But you told Kevin to take some precautions, and then you set up a trap anyway.”

“There are a lot of people who might want to kill me if they got into secure military files,” Jerry explained. “Terrorists. A cartel family. A Bosnian weapons dealer. It was possible that I was a target, but even then, I didn’t really think Kevin was. Not until that whatever it was showed up. That’s when I knew Yuna’s father was still alive.”

“And that’s when you sent that message telling Kevin to go hide at a prearranged location,” I finished.

Jerry wasn’t inclined to say anything about the prearranged hiding place. “Yes.”

Sig addressed the table at large. “So does anybody have any ideas on how to find this grandfather?”

“We can check out burned-down priest’s houses on Mount Fuji,” I offered. “Or have Parth do it for us. There can’t be that many of them. We can look into who’s been acquiring Kevin’s sperm too.”

“That’s fine, but Kevin is staying with me until this is done,” Sarah said, then looked at me a little wryly. “And at least a few of you ought to stay with me and help guard him.”

“Sounds good, but we can’t just play defense, Sarah,” I said. “If the onmyouji can’t find Kevin, sooner or later he’s going to try to make Kevin come to him. It’s only a matter of time before he starts kidnapping or killing Kevin’s family or friends to draw him out.”

“My only other family is a brother who’s in the Navy,” Jerry said. “He’s on a battleship.”

Surrounded by iron, miles and miles of salt water, and lots of witnesses. That wasn’t too bad, actually.

“I have a few friends.” Kevin made this sound like a confession. “I guess I could tell them my grandfather is yakuza and some bad people might come around looking for me. They’d kind of get into that.”

“You should do whatever you can do,” I said. “But we still need to find this onmyouji and shut him down fast.”

Sarah gave a distinctly unhappy sigh. “I have an idea.”