Ink

Chapter 14

The sound of my keitai beeping woke me the next morning.

I rubbed my eyes until they turned red.

“What time is it?” I mumbled, fingers splayed out as they searched the table beside me for the phone. I flipped the keitai open and looked at the text message from Tomohiro.

Meet me at 1pm, Shizuoka Station. —Yuu I stared at the name he’d written. Yuu felt distant and strange, but maybe he’d just made a mistake. He did seem a little off since the kendo retreat.

I stayed too long in the shower, until my skin turned pink and taut under all the steam. I put on my pretty pink shirt and a cream skirt, and even tried to do my hair up, which didn’t really work that well, but hey, points for effort, right?

I waited outside the bus loop until I saw him stride over, his eyes cold and distant. He had the same look from school, the way he’d look staring at me from across the courtyard.

“Come on,” he said, looping his fingers around my wrist.

“Hey,” I said, following behind him. I pulled my hand out of his grip as I followed him. “What’s up with you today?”

“Sorry,” he said, looking down at the ground. “It’s my wrist. It’s really bugging me.” He pulled up the black wristband he wore to cover it and I gasped. The stitches were still visible, and the gash looked way bigger than I remembered.

“Will it…will it leave a scar?”

He hesitated for a second, then smirked and slipped the soft wristband back over the cut.

“I’ve got quite the collection,” he said, but the joke just made my stomach twist.

He led me through the winding, narrow streets of the Oguro neighborhood, until I’d completely lost track of where we were. He reached again for my arm and pulled incessantly, checking his watch again and again. So much for a nice date.

My pink-and-cream outfit looked completely out of place against the monotonous gray of the streets.

At last he led me toward a tall building. I couldn’t read the kanji, which wasn’t new. When he stopped abruptly, I almost crashed into his back.

“Close your eyes,” he said, turning his head to the side and not meeting my eyes.

“Tomo.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Trust me.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Trust you, Mr. Cheesy?”

He gave me an agitated sigh. “Ii kara!”

“Fine, fine.”

“Okay.” His voice was heavy, but I closed my eyes and let him lead me up the stairs and through some glass door.

The building inside smelled of dried flowers and musty carpet. We went up some more stairs and down a hallway, and I opened my eyes to peek. The hallway was lit with yellow lights glaring from above, an ugly carpet on the floor. Doors flanked both sides of the wall, like an apartment building.

Only, I was wrong.

Tomohiro stopped at one door and fiddled with a key in his pocket. He slid the lock open and led me in. The door clicked behind us, his hands on my shoulders. I stepped forward slowly, panic rising up my shoulders, buzzing in my ears.

I could barely get the words out. “What is this?” My throat felt like it had seized up.

“It’s a love hotel.” And there it was.

“What?” I couldn’t have heard him right.

“It’s popular in Japan,” he said, isolating me as he said it.

“It’s a place where we can be alone.” He turned around then, a sly smile on his face.

The room was huge, with a big soaker tub on the other side with marble steps leading up to it. And behind him, a neatly made bed. The whole thing looked like a very fancy hotel room, and I felt the lump in my throat growing.

He kissed me then, but it wasn’t at all like the kisses in his living room. His arms wrapped around me, but they weren’t gentle.

My world no longer felt like it was slipping out of balance.

It had tilted right over and I was falling, tumbling into space, into the flames below.

Yeah, he was gorgeous, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about him a lot since that night at his house. But it was too fast, way too fast. There was no way I was ready for this.

His kisses trailed to my shoulder, and the panic burned through me. My ears hummed like I’d been surrounded by screaming tweens at an Arashi concert.

“Tomo,” I said. “I don’t— I think— I’m not really ready for this.” I tried to lift his hands off me, but they snaked away and landed on my arms, my back, my hips. I stepped away from his lips as he leaned in, but his hands pressed me into the wall and he kissed me so hard I swore my lips would bruise.

I grabbed his shoulders with my hands and shoved him away. “I said quit it!”

The look on his face was horrible, an ugly sneer that made me look ungrateful. It made me feel like garbage, like he thought I was utter garbage.

“Typical Western girl,” he snapped, and time stopped. Hot tears sprang to my eyes and my stomach churned. He leaned in to kiss me again, but I turned away. I darted for the door and stumbled into the hallway.

“Katie!” I heard him call after me, but I ran faster, throt-tled down the stairs as my heart pounded in my chest. The tears wouldn’t stop, tracing down my cheeks and blurring my vision as I ran. I didn’t know where to go, but when I stared down the first-floor hallway, I saw that one end led to an array of doors and the other a glass door to the street.

I burst onto the sidewalk, clacking down the stairs in the shoes I’d so carefully chosen to go with my outfit. It seemed ridiculous now; all the warning signs, and yet I’d never admitted to myself what kind of guy he really was.

I raced down the street, choking back sobs. I stumbled as a shape rose in front of me, a person I hadn’t seen through my blurry vision. I tried to stop before we crashed, but my shoe twisted underneath me and I collapsed. He caught me before I hit the cement.

I looked up with horror.

Ishikawa.

“Greene?” he said, looking puzzled. His forehead creased as he looked at me with concern. “Are you okay?”

“Leave me alone,” I said, struggling out of his arms. I ran forward, but I could feel his eyes burning into my back as I sprinted away.

Oguro was a messy labyrinth of streets. I hurried onward, getting more and more lost, feeling like a dragon coiling in on its own tail, until my legs gave out. I fell to my knees, my lungs burning, and I cried there, cried and cried until the sobs ran dry.

I spent the night watching variety shows on TV, eating melon ice with a miniature wooden spoon they gave me at the conbini store. My head was spinning, even though I’d already downed two headache tablets with a slug of bitter oolong tea.

All the signs had been there. Didn’t I know better than to go for that kind of guy, thinking I had seen a different side of him and just excusing the way he acted the rest of the time?

I watched the variety-show panel as they jumped on little trampolines and shot hoops, and then talked about the history of onigiri rice balls.

I flinched when the phone rang. I didn’t want to answer it in case it was Tomohiro, although he hadn’t tried my keitai yet, so I figured he was pretty pissed.

Well, good. I was way more pissed.

The phone kept ringing. If it was Diane and I didn’t answer, then she’d worry and I’d never be allowed to be by myself again. Although that wasn’t really the worst punish-ment; apparently I wasn’t capable of making good judgments anymore.

The phone rang again. Maybe it was Yuki or Tanaka. They could pull me out of this spiral of misery. I swallowed hard, lifted the receiver and put it to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Um, hello?” It was a girl’s voice, gentle but unfamiliar. I wondered if it was a wrong number.

“Yes?”

“Is this, um, Katie Greene?”

“Unfortunately, it is.”

A confused hesitation. “What?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Yes, it’s me.”

“Oh.” Pause. She sounded so nervous. Why the heck was she calling me? “I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Yamada Shiori.”

My head buzzed with a migraine, but the name hit some sort of recognition. How did I know that name?

“I go to a girls’ school near Sunpu Park. I’m a friend of Yuu Tomohiro…?”

It struck me like a hit between the eyes, like a shinai cracking down on my head.

Shiori. The pregnant “girlfriend.”

“Oh, hi,” I said weakly. She gave an embarrassed laugh on the phone, like she was relieved I knew who she was.

“I wanted to ask you about Tomo-kun,” she said, and I felt like I would throw up. That was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I bet she really was his girlfriend after all. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

I dug the wooden spoon into the melon ice while I held the phone with my shoulder. “Yeah?”

“Well, have you noticed anything strange lately?”

The world that had been spinning stopped suddenly. I fell back into the couch and cupped the receiver with both hands.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’s been coming to visit me and help me with my…

situation. Our mothers were best friends before, um, before the accident. But he hasn’t been coming around lately, and he’s been sort of…cold, somehow. Tough.”

I couldn’t speak.

“The thing is, Yuu has some friends who are no good. I’m a little scared that he’s in trouble. You know, with his last girlfriend, when she was in trouble with them, he actually—

I know it sounds cruel but—he asked if he could sketch me so she would think he was cheating. He said he had to do something severe to protect her.”

Her words blurred in my ears. Yuu’s last girlfriend. Saeda Myu. The name cracked into my head.

Point. Two wins the match.

It hit me then, in a horrible way. The argument between Myu and Tomohiro in the genkan at school, the way he’d been a total ass to her. The betrayal in her eyes, that she’d thought he was different, and his confession to me later in Toro Iseki.

I had to hurt her to protect her, to keep her safe from what I am.

My thoughts spun. I could hear Shiori calling my name, but I couldn’t respond.

I was a moron. An absolute, total moron.

It wasn’t like Tomohiro to take me to a love hotel, to say the things he’d said. He was messing with me to get me to hate him.

To save me.

“Katie?” Shiori’s gentle voice reached through the chaos swirling in my head.

“Shiori,” I said. “I think he’s in trouble. I’m going to find him.” I copied down her number, promising to call her back, and slammed the phone down.

I grabbed my purse and pushed open the sliding door to the deck, where Diane’s bike gleamed in the setting sun. I lifted the handlebars over my shoulder and dragged the bike to the door, shoving it into the elevator and cramming it through the lobby doors.

The wheels hit the pavement and I was off, snaking away from the sunset over Shizuoka, into the end-of-day humidity. I wove through cars, motorbikes and taxis. The clouds above gathered and the rain started to drizzle down, not much more than a fog around me.

How could I have been so stupid? How could I fall for it so easily?

The more I thought about it, the sicker I felt. What were the chances in a city of seven hundred thousand people that I would run into Ishikawa right outside the hotel? That’s why Tomo hiro kept checking his watch—he’d asked Ishikawa to wait outside so he could see us break up. It was a setup to throw off the Yakuza. I could see that now. And I’d fallen for it.

He really pissed me off.

I wound past Shizuoka Station and up into the streets of Oguro, where I was a bit lost. It had been hours since it had happened, so why would he still be here? I followed the way as well as I could remember, which really wasn’t that well.

The streets were deserted in the rain, and the darkness fell quickly. Before I knew it, I was biking through Oguro alone, the roads lit by the humming fluorescent lights of the conbini stores every few blocks.

I stopped in front of one and flipped open my keitai. I dialed Tomohiro, but his phone was off and it went straight to his voice mail. I pedaled forward again, hunting through the maze of Oguro, searching for…something.

An hour later, the backs of my legs ached and I hadn’t found anything. I decided on a new plan and set out for Shizuoka Station. And then came a loud crash.

There was an overturned garbage can near the mouth of Sunpu Park, and beside it on the bridge I saw a familiar shock of white hair.

I slowed down, lifting my leg over the bike. I coasted on one pedal the way Tomohiro always did. I jumped off as I neared the bridge, slipping behind a white truck parked there.

Ishikawa pulled himself up onto the cement railing of the bridge, kicking his legs against the stone. Two of his unshaven cronies stood with him, one wearing sunglasses, the other smoking a cigarette. I wondered if they were the same ones who’d confronted me when I was with Jun, but they didn’t look familiar. How many Yakuza were in Shizuoka anyway?

It wasn’t like it was Tokyo or Kobe, the center of their headquarters. What the hell were they here for? The fields of tea?

Oh. Probably.

And then I saw Tomohiro standing across from them, his navy gym bag at his feet, surrounded, with no hope of escaping.

He didn’t look stressed, though. He leaned against a sakura trunk, hands in his pockets, slouching. He wore a short-sleeved cream jacket over his black T-shirt and jeans, the soft color catching the dim lights around the bridge. He looked down at the ground, his bangs fanning into his eyes.

“How long are you going to deny it?” Ishikawa said. I pressed my fingers into the cold metal edge of the truck and slid down to squat on my heels. Alarm bells blared in my head. Should I call the police? Or would that be even more exposure Tomohiro didn’t want?

Tomohiro didn’t answer, and Ishikawa laughed, smacking his fist against the railing.

“It doesn’t really matter if you admit it or not,” he said.

“We know you drew the dragon, Yuuto. I’m just trying to give you a chance. We’ve been best friends a long time. I want to help you, man. I know you’re scared.”

It sounded like the speech he gave me. And Tomohiro smirked at it, too, staring Ishikawa straight in the eye.

“Scared of what?” he said. “You’re talking shit.”

“Scared of your power,” Ishikawa said. “Scared of the possibilities. You think you’re the only Kami in Shizuoka? I heard about the nightmares you ‘gifted ones’ have. And shit are you gifted, Yuuto. You think all Kami can make dragons?”

Tomohiro smirked and looked away. “Like I said, you’re crazy, Sato.”

“Oh? How’d you get that scar on your wrist, Yuuto?”

Tomohiro wrapped his slender fingers around his wristband and twisted it back and forth.

“Fuck you,” he spat. The two guys beside Ishikawa lurched forward and Tomohiro uncoiled, balling his hands into fists.

My breath caught in my throat.

“Yuuto,” Ishikawa said, his eyes gleaming in the darkness. There was something tender in his voice. “I don’t want it to go this way.” He leaped to his feet and strode forward, in front of the brawly guys. “Please don’t make me do this.”

“Walk away from this, Sato,” Tomohiro said. “You think you’re in control of this situation? You think you’re important to them?”

Ishikawa stared at him for a minute, his face turning red.

“They’re using you, Sato. And you’re letting them.”

“Shut up!” Ishikawa shouted, his voice cracking as the words buzzed in my ears. “You want to see me in control, Yuuto? Fine!”

“Sato—”

“Screw you!” He turned to the thugs, tears in his eyes, his voice broken. “Bring him! If you break his wrist, I’ll break yours.”

The men were on him suddenly, and Tomohiro was pushing, shoving them away. I heard a horrible crack and saw Tomo hiro’s fist outstretched, one of the men ricocheting away.

The guy in the sunglasses dove for Tomohiro’s knees and they buckled, the two men tumbling to the ground. He punched Tomohiro in the face and pulled at his hair, his hand coming away with a wad of copper strands. Tomohiro kicked and squirmed, slamming the man against the tree trunk. He was up again and the guy with the cigarette was on him, blood dripping from his bottom lip. Ishikawa stayed out of it, backed against the bridge. He was shaking, like he wanted to call the goons off. His face was full of regret and his mouth opened, but he closed it again, looking down.

He didn’t have the guts to stop them. Some best friend.

Or maybe he couldn’t. Maybe they wouldn’t listen anyway, like Sugi hadn’t with Jun.

Cigarette punched Tomohiro in the stomach and he dou-bled over. I let out a silent scream, but when Ishikawa’s eyes shot toward me, I realized it hadn’t been silent at all.

Crap.

“Katie,” Ishikawa said, renewed resolve in his voice. “Grab her!” I rose to my feet, but they felt like blocks of lead. I turned and ran, trying to get my leg over the bike as I scooted forward on one pedal. When that didn’t work, I threw the bike down, fumbling in my purse for my phone as I ran.

“Katie!” shouted Tomohiro, and he was up like a shot. The men reached me first, linking their fat arms around mine and dragging me backward. My phone clattered to the ground.

I cried out and struggled in their grip, and as I pulled from side to side, Tomohiro’s image shook in front of me, his eyes filled with terror.

“Greene, you’re just not having a good day, are you?”

Ishikawa shouted, but all I could see was Tomohiro scrambling forward, blood trickling down his face.

Cigarette yanked my arms behind my back while Sunglasses stood there with his hand on my neck. They both reeked of sweat and tobacco.

“Fuck you, Satoshi!” Tomohiro screamed, and the smile faded from Ishikawa’s face. He looked embarrassed, even.

“Leave her out of this!”

“I thought you two broke up,” Ishikawa said. “But it doesn’t look that way, does it?”

I heard my own voice, trembling, vibrating under the meaty fingers of Sunglasses. “We broke up,” I said.

“Really?” Ishikawa said. “Why’s that, then? Did you find out about him? Who he really is?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied. He smirked.

“Is that true? You don’t know the monster lurking inside him? He’s a danger to all of Japan, Greene, all of the world.

You don’t know what he’s capable of.”

“I didn’t know what you were capable of,” I spat. The goons jerked me backward.

Ishikawa shouted, “Yuuto! Work with us, and we’ll let her go.”

No. He was going to use me as bait. Tomohiro’s eyes met mine, and in them there was none of the darkness that I had seen in the hotel, no ugliness or hatred. I saw only our link, the axis that kept our worlds spinning, that kept us in balance. And I knew that neither of us could leave the other.

Tomohiro started to shake. He turned to Ishikawa and his back was toward me, his navy kendo bag trampled on the ground. Fresh blood leaked between the stitches across his wrist and curled up his fingers, dripping to the ground. His body heaved with every breath, and I knew he would give himself up. I could almost hear the words rounding on his lips, giving them up to save me. Destroying himself for me.

But the words didn’t come. He shook, more and more violently, and then something glinted in the darkness, sparkling like a jewel. Ink shimmered on the ground where it had oozed out of his duffel bag, out of the corner of velvet that lay torn at the mouth of the zipper. And then something reflected off Tomohiro’s hip. The glint grew darker, more encompassing and thicker. Ink dripped from under his cream jacket, spreading in two swirling clouds around him like the glittering dust that had trailed the wagtail.

When the ink clouds touched the ground they curled upward, like waves encircling him in slow motion. The ink from the kendo bag sprawled upward and joined them, trailing up his spine in slow motion and spreading out at his shoulders.

His fists shook violently. The men holding me swore and released their grip as they watched.

“What the hell?” Sunglasses shrieked.

Ishikawa’s face was pale, as papery as anything Tomohiro had drawn. He fell to the ground, scrambling backward until his back pressed against the scratchy stone of the bridge.

Tomohiro moaned as the inky clouds swirled around him.

There was a vague shout gathering on the air, but it wasn’t coming from him. I could hear it rattling around in my head, but there was no sound in my ears. The traces of the voice grew louder and louder until it was yelling in my head. I put my hands over my ears, but the sound seemed to come from inside. An icy breeze blew along my neck, racing toward Tomo hiro as the clouds glinted and spread.

The ink feathered into monstrous black wings on his back.

Two streams of ink spread upward, taller than Tomohiro—

seven feet, then twelve, taller and taller like great spiraling horns. The goons had backed up now, and I should have run to Tomohiro—or run away—but we were all frozen by the horrible apparition.

The ink carved itself into a jawbone, cheekbones, deep-set eyes. Four sharp horns grew from the top of the smoky ink as it towered over us.

Ishikawa screamed as the ink assembled a horrible, demonic face that laughed gleefully the harder Ishikawa shrieked. I was glad I couldn’t see its features from behind Tomohiro; I’d never seen Ishikawa act like that, so paralyzed with horror.

He stared, his own face whiter than his hair, and my blood ran cold watching him.

Suddenly the ink fell like a waterfall. It splashed downward, Tomohiro collapsing with it, the ink splattering everywhere like blood. It sprayed against my face, warm and tingling on my skin.

I stumbled forward, snatching my keitai off the ground and shoving it into my pocket as I ran.

I knelt over Tomohiro; he was unconscious.

“Tomo!” I cried. The ink that pooled around him began to trace paths along the cement, reaching toward me like grasping fingers.

“It’s you,” Ishikawa said, and I barely heard him.

“Tomo! Can you hear me?”

“You’re the key to all this, aren’t you?”

“Can you shut it?” I shouted. “He needs an ambulance or something!”

“The ink. It reacted to you. There wasn’t a drop until you got here.”

Shut up, I thought, but I was shaking.

Because he was right.