CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I was swimming again, the warm water of late summer caressing my belly and sides. The light glimmered above.

Somehow, underneath the pleasing rhythmic strength of my body I sensed an urgent need to keep going. I had to move forward. The pleasant hum of the sunshine on my back slowly faded. A chill crept over me, and an odd, bitter taste to the water flowed through gills on either side of my neck. Craning back, all I could see at first were the ripples, bubbles and disturbed river-mud marking my passage. Was that a shadow? An unfamiliar outline of something bigger than a river trout or eel?

The little Koi-flame, the buried awareness of my true self, flickered to life. Keep going. To the river. We have to get to the river.

But I am in the river.

Frustration rose up from my belly. That was definitely a shadow behind me, human-shaped.

Human?

I remembered blue coats and being stabbed and the terrible weight of the Baku in my mind, crushing the frantic beating of my heart. Danger! Human-shapes were dangerous and I had to get away. I flexed the powerful muscles along my spine to put on a burst of speed, but they reacted only limply, strangely atrophied as if I’d spent too long stagnant and slumbering. The bright, mammal scent of crushed grass coalesced out of the strange bitterness in the water. Not water. I was on land, and there was danger—

“There she goes!”

I opened my eyes, human eyes, as the Black Pearl gave a wobbly lurch toward the Aisaka. “You did it,” Ken said.

“She’s still half-asleep, seeing her own river dream. There was something weird in the water in her dream, but I didn’t do anything, really.”

Kwaskwi waved his arms and gave an ululating yell. Yukiko’s eyes went huge in surprise and she silently darted after the Black Pearl’s wildly thrashing tail while Kwaskwi scrambled backwards madly, trying to channel their zigzag progress toward the Aisaka.

“There’s something odd about the river in that dream and how much it looks like this one,” I said wearily. Ken threw me a questioning look over his shoulder, but when I didn’t elaborate, he hobbled after the dragon parade.

The slight widening of the river at the closest bend looked as shallow as Ken had promised, but even water that rose only to my knees could hide treacherous currents. Ken said he wouldn’t let me drown, and I believed he meant that, but he was injured.

Kwaskwi reached the top of the embankment just in front of the Black Pearl’s sleek head. He held out his arms wide, crouching low. “Come on, girl. Almost there.” With an astounding leap, Kwaskwi flew into the air on legs like coiled springs, reaching for the upper branch of a grandfather willow tree halfway down the embankment. He caught the branch and swung round it like an Olympic gymnast. On the last upswing he curled himself into a ball and landed perfectly balanced on the branch.

Crouching jay, drunken dragon.

The Black Pearl couldn’t halt her headlong rush to the river and flopped into the water with a splash that sent droplets pattering down over everyone.

“Swiftly, now,” said Ken, wiping the back of his hand at water collected at the corner of his eyes like tears. “Before she gets her bearings.”

Kwaskwi sat on the branch, swinging his legs in the air, and pulled out his cell, orientating it landscape as he snapped pics of the coiling Black Pearl. I shot him an are you kidding look.

“What? The guys will never believe this otherwise.”

Yukiko started down the embankment and Ken tugged us after her, carefully gripping my clothed wrist. The wet grass was slick on the way down, and I found myself wishing for Dad or for Marlin; someone bossy who I could trust to know the right thing to do. Because even if it involved giant dragons and imminent drowning, at least I would be confident I wasn’t utterly mucking things up. This whole operation pinned too many hopes on me. Without a lucid Baku, The Eight wouldn’t be challenging the Council or possibly sending the entire Kind population of Japan into a fatal population tailspin.

No running away.

Maybe if I repeated it another hundred times I could control my racing heart and the urge to jerk out of Ken’s grasp.

“You’re sure this is the best way?”

Ken maneuvered us closer to the water. “She can’t be free until you break her out of the dreaming. She’s suffered long enough for the Council’s pleasure.”

The Black Pearl’s head rose from the coils of her body, blinking double eyelids, the fleshy frilled protrusions around her eyes and along her jaw glistening wetly in the morning sun. She seemed confused, but no longer wildly thrashing.

“I won’t…I can’t hurt you.” Was I saying it to the Black Pearl or Ken?

Ken squeezed my wrist. “Your heart is strong enough for this, Koi. I can do this. You can do this.”

“I’ll never forgive you if you die.”

“Yukiko won’t let that happen.” Ken’s voice was firm, but a fierce tic pulsed in his jaw. He’d gone feral Kitsune again, all sharp planes and bloodless lips pressed together in a grim line of terrible resolve. And the sight of him, even bruised and bloodied, still had the power to make my chest ache with an urge to feel those lips on my own, to breathe in his Old Spice and for a short space, not be alone with my fear of becoming a monster.

Morbanoid Koi understood why Ken risked his life. It was atonement. It made sense in a way I hadn’t understood until Ullikemi’s fierce desire for the sun, Mangasar Hayk’s evil, and Tojo’s ruthlessness. Something had to be done and I was the one with the power to do that something.

“Into the breach,” I said, and stepped through crushed cat tails with Yukiko and Ken sidling after me. The water was a chill shock that grew colder by degrees. It didn’t matter, I had to push forward over shifting river rocks and ankle-grabbing slimy river plants. Yukiko kept that cold gaze fastened on the Black Pearl, but I didn’t dare pay attention to her for too long. Instead I concentrated on trying to catch hold of a nearby floating coil.

“Watch out!” Kwaskwi called from above. The Black Pearl’s tail swiped toward us in a rolling wave of brackish water. Ken waded in front of me with surprising speed, using his arms to deflect the impact. With a sharp cry of pain he teetered and began to tip over in slow motion, eyes closed tightly in a face gone as pale as Yukiko’s.

I grabbed his arm just as Yukiko caught the slim end of the Black Pearl’s gray-tipped tail and slapped it around my bare wrist. A fleeting impression of a hand formed of ice pressing my neck and wet sandpaper on my wrist touched me before the world swiveled in on itself like a movie camera shutter.

A dream. No, two dreams—Yukiko and the Black Pearl—jostled for dominance in a nausea-producing psychedelic dance of gray, white and black, fading finally into blessed darkness.

A white web of cracks split the bottom left corner and spread in diagonal bursts with a heart-stopping wave of needling cold and the sting of ozone. A precarious urgency gripped me, like standing on tip-toes, reaching for the last clean shoyu dish from the high shelf at Marinopolis. Then the darkness shattered, spinning away in shards.

I swam in my river. The metallic, decayed flesh tang of the water, the tiny shapes of darting fish, and the warm sunlight meant home and contentment. The powerful flex of my tail sent me streaming through the water, my length undulating in rhythmic harmony with the current. Warmth on my back made me fairly vibrate with happiness, a song that spiraled out from me in all directions, communicated up and down the river in a joyful prayer to Abka Hehe. She would surely send her spotted kesike servants to sing feline yowls with me.

What then is that oddly elongated shadow disturbing the bang huahua yu ahead of my path?

Just ahead, around the bend, the river entered a narrow valley where the sturgeon glided like torpid ghosts, an easy meal for an agile river dragon, but that shadow was no sturgeon.

Another thought appeared startling in its simple clarity: It is Koi who knows this. I am Koi.

I paused, muscles spasming up and down my undulating spine, gliding blind as double eyelids shut in surprise. I am Muduri Nitchuyhe and you are Baku!

I reared out of the water only to crash down again in an explosion of frothing water; a choking cloud of plant slime and pebbles and mud.

Time froze. Silt particles suspended in the water were eerily distinct, as was the surprised eye of a brown-silver fish caught mid-flight from my snout.

And then the world spun 360 degrees, vertigo morphing to top-of-a-rollercoaster breathlessness, before morphing again to sour nausea.

Then cold. Glaring, caustic, bone-eating, gorgeous cold. The white perfection of snow-covered land in an unbroken expanse with room enough to breathe and to grow. Teasing wind drove the far-off mournful cry of wolves to my ears, but they were only a minor irritation in the glory of the sunlit morning. I pressed bare soles into packed snow, hardening foot prints into ice, and opened my arms to the whistling wind teasing snarls into my long white hair.

Yukiko’s fragment? How did I—?

A flame burst into life within, the crawling heat making me wrinkle my nose in distaste. Acting on instinct, I flung myself to the ground, inhaling sweet snow as a great weight shook loose with a yank that tore through each individual cell in my body. Gasping on my back, I stared up at an endless watery blue sky. I flipped over, only to have the sky blocked by a face so pale it was easily lost in the lazy swirl of delicate wind-driven flakes.

Yukiko stood over me. Not the Yukiko I’d met, but a primal Yukiko that must have inspired all the deadliest snow maiden stories. Unbound, streaming white hair tangled into knots over her exposed, creamy flesh. Her cheeks shone with a faint fever blush and her eyes, the gelid blue of glaciers, were devoid of fleshly aberrations like emotion.

I’m in your dream.

She nodded. I remembered the ice cold hand at my neck just before the dreams. I sat up, distracted by the peculiar homeliness of my own hands. Koi’s hands, bitten cuticles and healing scratches from the airport attack so long ago. Eons ago.

You grabbed me in the river to give me your dream? Why?

I stood, shivering in the wind despite the steady, warming flame of my Baku self burning within my belly. A wrinkle marred the pale porcelain of her brow. Her eyes narrowed, piercing through flimsy conjecture.

I remembered Ullikemi’s final dream—the great snake and I in a primeval forest of Ken’s dreaming. In it, I’d had a presence distinct from the dreamer for the first time. Like now. Only this was Yukiko’s primal dream. I had a sense of being Yukiko, like coming in from winter sledding flushed, cheeks wind-burned and still tingling hours afterwards, but also of myself. Is this what it’s like to be invited in? Can I exist as myself, Koi Pierce?

She gave an impatient nod. Amazing she could convey that mix of disdain and eagerness with such tiny nuanced changes in the muscles of her face. She was giving me her most primal, kernel-self dream. The only reason for pulling me into her dream other than trying to stop me, would be to try to help.

Someone’s going to have to die, Ken had said in the truck.

Yukiko was powerful and had accumulated eons of dreaming. It was like offering the Baku hunger a seven layer Opera Cake while Ken was a mere shortbread cookie. The Baku in me hungered for Yukiko, but I held back.

This isn’t the plan. But even as the thoughts flickered between us, frigid resolve strengthened the piercing challenge of Yukiko’s regard. She knew what I’d left unspoken. This way Ken didn’t get the absolution he craved: risking his life. Anger percolated through the corralled hunger.

Who are you to take that away from him?

Yukiko flung her arms wide and the teasing wind swept forward, gentle no longer, gusting strong enough to feel like a punch to the guts, bending me double. The flame of myself deep inside flickered, shrunk to a pinprick. Her bloodless lips curled back in a grimace, revealing pointed canines. With hair streaming like a living, growing ice cloud, she was the very embodiment of winter itself. Some primitive part of my hindbrain recognized a pitiless predator. Fear washed over me.

The air crackled. My eyelids were frozen open, the inside of my nose scraped raw with killing frost. It hurt to breathe.

So stop breathing. This is a dream. Fear had woken the survivalist part of me and rekindled a wisp of the little Baku flame. I lusted for the rich bounty of Yukiko’s dream in the same way I’d hungered for Dzunukwa. A dream. And I am a dream eater. So burn, little flame, burn.

The flame, all that was Koi and Baku, flared with a searing pain across my middle. Still I held it in check. This wasn’t the plan.

Yukiko’s eyes narrowed to slits of glacial ice, the mortal elemental enemy of fire. She spread her arms again wide and made a harsh whistling noise between clenched teeth. The wind gusted again, knocking me to my knees in the packed snow. I closed my eyes and grit my teeth against the cutting edge of the cold.

If I die here, will my real body die too?

Images flashed. Mom’s devastatingly thin face smiling up at me from the worn vinyl of the infusion chair, Marlin clinking her soy mocha against my regular latte at Stumptown with a familiar, endearing impatience, Mt. Hood rising up out of rainclouds over the glass and metal panels of the PCC Sylvania Bookstore like a benediction.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to hurt Yukiko, but I am not running away from this. I am Baku. She is in my realm.

I pried open my eyelids and pushed myself up to a standing kneel. Yukiko gave me a slow, fierce flash of her teeth, ending in a sneer just as another impossibly strong gust of wind knocked me flat on my back.

Okay, then. Monster it is.