CHAPTER ONE

“Benadryl acts like speed on some special people instead of making them drowsy,” Kwaskwi observed from his seat across the aisle. He smiled widely, revealing a plethora of large, white teeth in orderly rows. Stupid smile. Stupid slick, black pony tail making him look like that Anishinabe actor, Adam Beach. Stupid jay. Why didn’t he just fly over the Pacific Ocean by himself? But no, he had insisted on sticking with Dad and me. And Ken.

I glanced over at Ken, deeply asleep in the window seat. Irritatingly tidy and unrumpled. His thick, Asian-black hair was smoothed into a loose pompadour with a smelly brilliantine I saw for the first time this morning back in Portland. Ken had shelled out two Benadryl tablets after take-off and promised Dad would sleep before abandoning me completely for his own nap.

That left only me to deal with the third man in my trio of men-not-to-be-stuck-with on a trans-pacific flight: Dad. He looked tired—his gray hair smashed into gnarly swirls—but also sweaty and agitated.

“Dad,” I said. Then repeated in Japanese, “Otoo-san.” Dad wouldn’t even meet my eyes. I murmured to him in a low, hopefully soothing voice, telling him over and over in Japanese who he was, who I was, where we were. His hands were clenched into fists, foot tapping so hard I could feel the vibration through the metal floor—one of the most powerful Kind in the U.S. and Japan was having a meltdown.

Apparently he didn’t like flying. That would explain a lot of my childhood. Like why we rarely went to Hawaii to visit Mom’s relatives, and had never gone to Japan before.

It would have been nice to know about this fly-o-phobia before we got on the plane.

I tipped my Dutch Brothers French Toast latte to my lips, but it had been drained to dregs hours ago. Plane coffee wouldn’t cut it. Six hours to go to Narita. How would I survive?

I tried again, this time in Dad’s Northern home-town Aomori dialect. “It’s okay, nothing’s going to happen to you.”

If only I could hold his hand.

But we were Baku, Dream Eaters. A touch was enough to exchange dream fragments, and Dad was tottering on the edge of sanity since he’d used his Baku abilities to help me fight a dragon of the hidden, magical Kind in Portland’s Ankeny square.

My whole life only Dad had been safe to touch. Even when I thought it was Alzheimer’s causing his dementia, I could risk his bare skin contact without getting overwhelmed by a dream fragment. But not now. Because of the dragon, Ullikemi, Dad had just revealed it wasn’t Alzheimer’s at all, but a dream fog resulting from self-imposed exile in Portland. He’d run away from Japan so he could completely stop eating dreams. Lucidity came in brief, awful flashes. Since Ankeny Square, they’d been almost non-existent. There was no way to tell if his usual defenses were up. If I gave him a fragment now accidentally, it might tip him over the edge. Or worse, if he was caught in some kind of dragon dream-eating blowback and he gave a fragment to me, my Baku inexperience meant I might join him in fogland.

Thus the plane trip. Ken, an emissary from the Council in Tokyo, had convinced me through his help with the whole dragon situation that the Tokyo Council Dad had run away from was actually Dad’s only hope. And my CPA classes at Portland Community College had ended for the semester.

Kwaskwi had crashed our party under various flimsy pretexts. He was huffy at not being officially notified of Dad’s presence in Portland, for one. And my endangering of his giant eagle Kind friend, Thunderbird, during my fight with Ullikemi was a sore point too, along with a dozen other complaints he made up on the spot in his usual roguish, insufferable way. I suspected the real reason he was coming to Japan was to keep an eye on me. I’d acknowledged a debt bond to Kwaskwi during the dragon fight, and apparently I was too valuable to let slip away.

I tucked the red Delta blanket around Dad—it was chillier than I’d foreseen at this altitude—and hoped a momentary lull in the tapping meant he’d calmed down.

My phone vibrated. My sister, Marlin, had sent me a Snapchat. I swiped right. It was a selfie of her bossy face, doodled so that her eyebrows were comically arched and granny glasses perched on the end of her nose, staring accusingly into the camera.

I smiled. She was worried about Dad. I hadn’t contacted her since before passing security.

“Good thing Akihito isn’t wearing a turban,” said Kwaskwi, now chewing on a toothpick. Actually, the entire five seater middle row was populated entirely by middle-aged Asian men chewing on toothpicks, but Kwaskwi still made it into some kind of annoying comment on my inability to keep Dad calm.

My right hand reached for the Tcho Mokaccino bar I’d stashed in my cardigan pocket. No. Mental slap. I had no idea how hard it would be to find good chocolate in Tokyo and Mokaccino was for serious emergencies only.

It occurred to me I didn’t really understand Kwaskwi’s turban reference. “What?”

“Your father’s got all the terrorist warning signs. Nervous agitation, sweats, flying while non-white,” Kwaskwi said around the toothpick. He turned to the in-seat entertainment system and started flipping through romantic K-dramas.

Dammit, he was right. We were attracting attention. I’d have to touch Dad. See if a fragment was causing this.

Back when I still thought I was just a freak, I used to meditate on the clean, simple strokes of elementary level kanji like “sun” and “moon” to suppress invasive dream fragments I’d accidentally acquired from clumsy everyday touches. The mental discipline of drawing kanji in my mind kept the fragments from taking over my waking hours. That had worked right up until Ken and Kwaskwi sauntered into my life. Kind fragments were different. Kanji were about as useful as limp noodles in staving off the dream fragments of the Kind.

Still, I pictured traditional ink brush painting’s pure, clean swathes of inky black on thick rice paper anyway, to prepare. I took a deep breath. Okay, here we go. Once more into the breach.

I rested my palm lightly on Dad’s wrist.

The airplane went tilt-a-whirl. For a stomach-wrenching moment all I could do was sit, hands clenched tightly, muscles and tendons spasming out of control. Then with a whoosh, it felt like my belly opened up and a thousand butterflies escaped onto the plane. Everything stilled, pins and needles pricking across my skin. The seatbacks, tray tables, thick-paned windows, even the bent comma form of sleeping Ken began to bleed at the edges, growing fuzzier and fuzzier, the color spreading in slow, dropped-molasses pools until everything was a formless, cerulean blue.

A sky. And I was flying through it not in an Airbus A320, but with the joyful strength of my own, gloriously gold-feathered wings, drinking in the heat and energy of the sun like solar panels.

Oh. Nausea sifted into the emptiness in my belly. This was Thunderbird’s dream. Dad was still experiencing Thunderbird’s dreams, so I got the joy of feeling them, too.

This was a tattered echo of the true, powerful dreaming a waking Thunderbird had forced on Dad and me in a misguided attempt to hold us in thrall. There was a hint of kernel-self in this dream. An echo of Thunderbird the ancient one dreamed over and over each night, but no real connection to him anymore.

Good. No danger if I ate the dream as I’d learned to do back in Portland. With a deep inhale, I drew in the blue of the sky, the Thunderbird-flavored echo, down, down into my belly. To where the kernel-self of me, Koi, resided as a dim, candle flame.

Eater of dreams.

The flame flickered into life, burning with a tingling heat that balanced on the knife-edge of pain and pleasure. Muscles spasmed up and down my back and I arched away from my seat like a taut bowstring. The dream fell away. My bones settled heavily into the narrow seat, the slick chill of the vinyl unpleasant against the sensitive skin underneath my knees and wrists.

“You are truly a glutton for punishment,” said Kwaskwi. I glanced at his laughing, opaque eyes, and then back at Dad. He looked less pale. Breath inflated his chest in an even rhythm. Eating some of Thunderbird’s dream lessened the pressure on him. I patted his hand and—

The airplane jerked out from under me and the world spun 360 degrees.

I plunged into an eddy of silt-flavored fresh water, granite pebbles gliding beneath my wide belly, slipping past thick stems of young lotus, leaves spread like hearts overhead. Temporary safety warred with excitement. Salt-water home left behind to travel upstream, upstream to the promise of—

“That’s enough.”

A sudden pain pierced my hand. “Ouch!”

My eyes fluttered open to see Ken leaning over Dad, my hand caught between his lips, biting deep into the fleshy pocket between thumb and forefinger.

“What the hell?” That hurt.

Ken released my hand. Dad turned toward me in the cramped seat, raking a shaking hand through the bottle-brush thickness of his more-salt-than-pepper hair. He exhaled, a long, slow breath. A calming breath to control the chaos inside.

“Dad?”

His eyes, darkest brown like my own, were hard to read. “Koi-chan, what you do?” English. So not Herai Akihito, Baku, talking, but my own father. The sushi chef. The singer of silly Japanese counting songs. The husband who absented himself when Mom lay dying in the hospital.

“Thunderbird’s fragment was still in you. I thought—” I swallowed something bitter. “—it was bringing on the dementia again.”

“Never do again,” said Dad. “You don’t touch me.”

Heat flushed my cheeks despite the altitude chill. I’d invaded his privacy. I couldn’t run away and I couldn’t drown unhappiness in lattes. Airplane travel was the worst.

“Excuse me,” said Ken, indicating with a chin-jerk he wanted to get up. I stood stiffly, rubbing my arms to get rid of uncomfortable emotions. Clambering over Dad, Ken blocked the haunted, angry look in Dad’s eyes.

Kwaskwi suddenly gave a braying laugh. Heads turned our direction.

“The Crow,” he said, pointing a finger at his screen. “I love this movie. They get so much right.”

I glared. He shrugged and went back to watching the screen—missing nothing of the little father-daughter Baku spat despite the movie.

The ambient heat of Ken’s body standing very close to me in the narrow aisle suddenly became a very salient detail. Hesitantly, I turned to face him. This close, he looked down on me from the foot’s difference in our heights. A scattering of scrubby beard outlined his wide mouth and his fleshy lower lip pouted out a bit.

“Airplanes are hard. Don’t upset him,” said Ken in a low voice. His warm breath brushed my ear—but the feeling didn’t bring its usual ticklish heat. Anger prickled instead.

Who was he to butt his bossy nose in? Napping foxes didn’t get to go all salty. Heat flushed down my neck and moisture started pooling on my upper lip and under my arms. Dad was my responsibility. Ken and his Kitsune bossypants had no jurisdiction here. He was my Dad.

Wait.

This wasn’t normal Koi irritation. This was the dream-eating. Such a little fragment shouldn’t result in the usual dream eating hangover, but here was the PMS-like irritation, and the hot flash, and soon there would be—

“Ow.” And there it was. Icepick-to-the-temples headache. The full hangover experience.

A worried crease appeared between Ken’s cleanly arched brows. “You look a little green.” I pushed him aside with one hand in the middle of his infuriatingly close chest. No line to the restroom, thankfully, but I spent a minute fighting the stupid folding door before sinking into blessed aloneness inside the stall.

I dug out the Midol mini-pack from my pocket. It worked better than Tylenol or even Advil on these hangover headaches. Two dry swallows, a palm-full of water to the back of my neck, and a couple of deep breaths later, the ice picks turned to dull throbs of manageable pain.

Digging knuckles into my eye sockets also helped. What was that second fragment? A river? Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with Thunderbird. I’d been underwater and scared. Where did Dad pick that up?

A knock sounded.

“Koi,” called Ken, softly. “Are you okay?”

Annoyance flared. He could have saved me the embarrassment and asked in Japanese so I wouldn’t get stares when I emerged. The plane dipped, forcing me to catch myself on the wet sink.

You’re on a plane to Tokyo, a perfectly reasonable part of my brain pointed out. With tons of Japanese passengers. No privacy here for Japanese or English. My stomach had a weird airiness, like the prickly, exposed feeling I’d gotten the few times Dad took Marlin and me to Obon Festival dances at the Portland Japanese School. We’d start speaking Japanese, our usual private language, and then have to stop mid-sentence.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Just give me a minute.”

After taking care of business, and wrestling my ratty hair into a marginally cleaner ponytail, I struggled the stupid door open. Ken hovered, that worried crease between his eyebrows deepening. We took each other’s measure in an awkward pause. I fought back an urge to smooth my thumb over his worry crease. Ken broke first, brushing past me into the bathroom.

Ah. Maybe I’d mistaken concern for a different urgent need. Thinking a few kisses and some heavy petting in the bare weeks we’d known each other made me expert on Ken’s facial tics probably wasn’t that smart. It was just that a part of me, only recently acknowledged, yearned for the closeness, the feeling of someone watching out for me, that I’d been missing since Mom died.

Kwaskwi was still engrossed with his movie when I teetered down the aisle back to my seat, but he turned away from the screen long enough to pinion me with a serious look. Kwaskwi, serious? Uh oh.

“You can chuck all this Council crap anytime you want. Just say the word.”

Say the word? And what, he’d take me back to Portland? And then me and Kwaskwi and his Kind buddies the Bear Brothers and the ice-breathing hag Dzunukwa could all go to Stumptown for celebratory mochas? Ugh. No, thank you. A large woman in a tie-dyed shirt huffed behind me.

“Excuse me.”

I angled myself to let her pass as Kwaskwi flagged down a passing stewardess and requested green tea in flawless Japanese.

I blinked, headache forgotten. Kwaskwi spoke Japanese. Of course he did. Of course he hadn’t revealed that until now. As I clicked the seatbelt shut, I mentally reviewed everything I’d said to Ken in Japanese, thinking it private.

“No Council chucking word from me,” I answered in Japanese. Was that a curl of disappointment in the usual, wide smile?

“Have to keep trying,” he said, returning earbuds ten times more expensive than my cell phone to his ears. Apparently First Peoples Kind didn’t face the same kind of socio-economic disadvantages as the humans did. Kwaskwi hadn’t even blinked at the last-minute trans-pacific fare.

Prosaic, much? My mind was doing the usual, going off on tangents so I didn’t have to think about weightier-but-more-difficult things. Like Dad. His eyes were closed and his chest rose and fell in even breaths.

Better because I’d left him alone and my nearness agitated him? No, it had to have been the fragment I’d consumed. Like releasing a pressure valve. Either way, no way in hell was I going to let Ken wake up Dad by climbing over to his window seat coming back from the toilet. I gripped the backs of the seats and more or less hoisted myself over Dad’s folded legs.

Ken had already completed the flight magazine’s crossword puzzle. Crumbs from the snack biscotti covered his seat. Worst of all, my cheapo earbuds were tucked away in the seat back pocket completely out of reach unless I jostled Dad. For a good five minutes or so I fumed. Where was Ken? I imagined him chatting up one of the cute Japanese stewardesses and closed my eyes, until the crazies settled back into the box where I usually kept a lid on pathetic thoughts.

The seat was warm, and the vibration of the plane made me so, so tired.

Next instant, completely without fade-in or other helpful transition, I woke with a start to a pounding headache.

“Koi,” said Ken, ensconced in the aisle seat. “We’re about to land.”

“What?”

“You slept four hours. We’re landing in Narita. Can you wake up your father?”

That was definitely crusted drool on my cheek. Sleeping while sitting up was the worst. “No,” I said. Then gave a weird little laugh at the taken-aback expression on Ken’s face. “I mean, I don’t want to touch him. Can you?”

Ken started to say something, and then visibly back-tracked. “Thunderbird’s fragment?”

“I don’t think so. He’s dreaming something I’ve never seen before.” I glanced at Kwaskwi, watching avidly over Ken’s shoulder. He pointed at the corner of one eye and then at me. Ah, crusted drool wasn’t my only post-nap surprise. Eye-cheese was also on the menu.

“Akihito,” said Ken, gently shaking Dad’s shoulder. With a jerk, Dad’s eyes flipped open and every muscle in his body flexed, tendons standing out in stark relief in his wiry neck and forearms. His mouth opened in a silent scream. Ken hadn’t even touched bare skin, and Dad looked like someone was force-feeding him nightmares. I reached for his sleeve, but Dad knocked my hand away.

“We have to calm him down,” I said.

Ken rapidly whispered in Herai dialect.

“Good luck getting through customs and immigration,” said Kwaskwi.

“Dad, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t do this,” said Dad through gritted teeth. He was lucid. This wasn’t the dementia. All the breath whooshed out of him, visibly deflating into a heap of bones covered in a Delta red blanket.

“We’ll be off the plane soon,” said Ken in English.

“It’s not the plane,” said Dad. “We’re too close. I thought I could handle it, but I was fooling myself. Resisting made me weaker, not stronger.”

“Close to what?”

“I didn’t want this for you, Koi,” said Dad. The vague unease I’d felt as we gotten closer and closer to Japan joined my overall ill feeling. The plane touched down with a jerk. All around us passengers rustled, stretched, and began rooting around for belongings.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll get you off the plane and then you’ll be okay.” Even as I spoke the words, it was clear they were meaningless sounds. Everything wasn’t okay. We were very far from okay. And far from home. I’d thought letting Ken take us back to Japan to meet the Council was our only hope for Dad to fight this dementia and for me to figure out how to control this dream eating business. But a small part of me worried it was only going to make things worse.

“Do it, Kitsune. It’s the only way I’ll survive Tokyo,” said Dad to Ken.

“Are you sure?” Ken asked.

“Do it!” The people in front of us paused in their sleepy conversation.

“What are you doing?”

Ken ignored my agitated whisper. He pulled out a slim syringe filled with a deep green liquid from a zipped, black toiletry bag.

I gasped. “How did you even get that past security? Don’t even think about injecting that into—”

Ken plunged the syringe into the juncture of Dad’s neck and shoulder.

“God damn it!”

Dad opened his eyes and cupped my cheek, thumb gently smoothing back a stray lock of hair. Dad was touching me. Voluntarily. I reeled from shock, or altitude drop or whatever. I almost missed his whisper in Japanese. “Listen to Kawano-sama, not Tojo. But don’t let them trick you. Don’t touch the Black Pearl.”