30

NOTHING NEVER HAPPENS

The following days acquired a patina of routine as I tried to become a regular part of the onmyouji’s world. Akihiko wasn’t going to let a knight who he couldn’t psychically read or predict run loose on his own territory, and accepting that the kitsune was going to follow me was my price of admission for being part of the Crucible. Akihiko never actually verbalized this, and I never formally agreed to it because acknowledging that particular reality would have caused one or the other of us to lose face, but it was true just the same.

It became a kind of game. I rarely saw the kitsune though I would occasionally come across her scent trail when I doubled back, and at least once a day she would make a point of letting me catch a glimpse of her sitting across from me at a café or standing behind me in a taxi queue, not that she needed a taxi. Chikako had a team of were-hyenas helping her follow me, and they were a lot easier to spot than she was. One of them was on a motorcycle, one of them was driving a pizza delivery car, one was on foot, and several more were jumping across surrounding rooftops as they watched me through field glasses. We didn’t speak or interfere with each other, and we all pretended not to care that the other side was out there. That would have been against the rules.

One time when the kitsune sat across from me at the park, I lowered the paper I was ostentatiously reading to show her that I was wearing one of those pairs of novelty glasses with a fake nose and moustache beneath them. Other times when I knew she was in hearing distance, I would speak cryptic code phrases into burritos I’d gotten off a food truck, or lean over and say into a nearby parking meter: “There are fireworks in the picnic basket. Repeat, there are fireworks in the picnic basket.” I don’t know if she was amused or annoyed.

Because I was being followed, I had to research Akihiko and his operation in plain sight while doing the sorts of things I would be doing if I really was hunting a rakshasa. I went to the warehouse a few times under the pretext of asking Akihiko if he’d heard anything, and I used these visits as an excuse to study the warehouse’s security whether Akihiko was around or not. I also made the rounds hunting down pit fights and gambling dens and poker games and various contests that waged animals against each other in cruel ways. Because, you know, humans suck. Whenever I encountered supernatural beings who gambled, I asked them questions about the Crucible under the pretext of finding out if a rakshasa had infiltrated it.

I wanted to know more about the physical location the Crucible was being held in too, and the larger context of aqueducts, canals, spillways, sewers, estuaries, and overflow channels that formed the system it was a part of, so I copied blueprints of the city’s infrastructure—something any hunter might do—and secretly mapped out the waterways in increments. And when I researched books on Eastern mythologies, I made sure that some of them focused on Japanese as well as Indian folklore. I discovered that the creature pretending to be Akihiko’s coat was called an ittan-momen, and the shadow thing was called an otoroshi, though specific information about these creatures and their motivations or weaknesses was proving hard to find. I wasn’t wasting time—I was laying the groundwork for any number of options or scenarios—but it was slow going.

When Akihiko made his next big play, I wasn’t even aware of it.

The person who had a front row seat was Ted Cahill.

Max Selwyn, one of Kevin Kichida’s best friends, went missing. Ted Cahill knew this because he was the sheriff of the town where Max Selwyn and Kevin lived, but also because Cahill had a short list of Kevin’s friends that he was keeping an eye on. Which was how Cahill wound up standing in the old house that Max shared with four other students off campus even though no one had officially reported Max as missing yet.

The same girlfriend who had called Tatum’s sheriff’s office just to make sure that Max wasn’t hurt had been Skyping with Max thirty-two hours earlier when their Internet connection was disrupted a bit after midnight. As far as Cahill could tell, Max had promptly stood up and left the room without turning off his computer or his lights. Then he left the house without taking his wallet or his car keys or his cell phone.

Max had walked downstairs, past the living room and out the back door in the kitchen area. The last person to see Max Selwyn was Max’s housemate, Sam Testerman. Sam saw Max go by in his peripheral vision, and maybe Max had seemed kind of out of it, but Sam didn’t think much about it. Sam had been wearing a headset while playing some alien-invasion videogame, and he’d been kind of out of it himself.

The other two boys in the house had been asleep. The only odd thing—maybe nothing—was that one of them had mentioned having really intense and crazy dreams that night, and the other roommate had blushed when he heard that. Blushed and admitted to a similar experience under Cahill’s special brand of hypnosis. While tranced, both boys recounted waking up to discover that they’d had explosive orgasms during the night. One remembered beautiful singing in his dreams.

Singing? Cahill recalled hearing somebody say something about a siren feather, even though he thought sirens were mermaids. Sirens sang and hypnotized people, though; he remembered that much from the Odyssey in the ninth grade.

Wandering outside, Cahill checked out the backyard, not that there was much of it. More interesting was the narrow back alley, a barely paved unlit strip where neighborhood residents could set their trashcans for pickup. Cahill followed Max’s scent trail until it abruptly stopped at a point where somebody could have had a car idling with its lights off. No signs of blood or scuffling. No neighbors who had heard screams or yells. If Max had gotten in a car under some kind of hypnotic compulsion, it would explain why there weren’t any signs of a struggle.

What it didn’t explain was what Cahill was supposed to do next. Max didn’t know where Kevin was. Akihiko probably didn’t expect Max to know where Kevin was. Akihiko had kidnapped Max in order to draw Kevin out of hiding. Kevin was supposed to be staying off of any social media accounts or e-mail providers just to prevent these kinds of head games, but he was a smart, curious kid and had access to the Internet. If Cahill wanted to control the information flow, he probably didn’t have a large window.

Cahill had to take a sick day and drive to New York City to do it, but he found a physical location where people who worked for Kevin Kichida’s service provider were situated. After five minutes of conversation, he used a mental compulsion to make some kind of jumped-up clerk give him Kevin’s message service password. Then Cahill made the office drone forget about it.

Cahill proceeded to check the phone messages on Kevin’s account. One in particular was both simple and strange: “This is your grandfather. I do not like the people you are associating with, Kevin. They are a bad influence. Look at the trouble they got your friend Max into. He is in so much pain. Why don’t you leave these troublemakers?”

The message was from a cloned phone, the burner number already smoke. No contact information. No directions for a time or place to meet. But then, if Kevin ran away from the people who were hiding and protecting him, Akihiko could find him easily enough. And if Kevin didn’t run away, the people protecting him couldn’t follow Akihiko’s message back to him.

Cahill deleted the message off Kevin’s account.

Max was taken. Dead or prisoner, nothing was going to change that. We were after Akihiko anyhow, and nothing was going to change that, either. I don’t know that Cahill decided to say to hell with Max, exactly, but Akihiko had made a move to put pressure on us, and the best way for Cahill to counter that move was to make sure we didn’t even know about it. No knowledge, no pressure. Cahill would work on tracking down Max himself.

It’s an easy thing to do when you’re freaked out, to try to control situations and not burden other people with information that will just make things harder on them while you’re handling everything. Information that might even make them worry and fret so much that they ask you a lot of questions you don’t have time for, or make you anxious or defensive when you need to focus. Hell, information that might even make other people do something stupid that will fuck things up before you have a chance to work it all out. Keeping things that you’re dealing with from people who might be affected can seem like a practical and protective instinct at the time, not like a lack of trust or a tendency to be controlling. I have been known to err on that side of things myself on occasion though I’m working on it.

All that’s just a guess, mind you. I can’t honestly say if Cahill’s decision to conceal knowledge from the rest of us was coldly rational or passionately irrational. Did his decision come from an inability to empathize, or was it all snarled up in love or need or desire? Was he convinced that Molly would do something noble and impractical, or that Sig would reveal herself while undercover, or that Kevin would sacrifice himself? It brings me back to my original question, really. Did Cahill’s decision result from having changed too much, or from not having changed enough? Was he inhuman or too human?