ringing sound cut out, and a woman’s voice recited ultra-politely that the customer was unavailable. I left a short, awkward message, and then hung up. Guess my questions would have to wait.
I opened the lid of my laptop, putting it on the low table by my bed, and sat down on my zabuton cushion beside it. Might as well find out what I could about the Imperial Treasures.
It turned out they were just about as mysterious to the rest of Japan as they were to me. They were called the Sanshu no Jingi, the Three Sacred Treasures. Only the emperor and his close aides had ever seen them, and even then only for special occasions. No one was even sure what they looked like, or if the treasures kept by the royal family were the originals.
They had really long, fancy names. The Yata no Kagami, for one, was Amaterasu’s mirror, the same one that had haunted Tomo’s nightmares and sketches. The one I had seen for the first time in my dreams a few nights ago.
Tomo had been wrong about their location, too. Only the Yasakani no Magatama jewel was kept in the palace in Tokyo. The sword, Kusanagi no Tsurugi, was in Nagoya, about two hours west of Shizuoka by bullet train. They were thought to be replicas, but Amaterasu’s mirror was supposedly the real one, and they kept it in a shrine in Ise, Mie Prefecture. I pulled up a map to see where Mie was. Southwest from here, past Nagoya and curved around a bay of water.
Outside the rain began to fall, tapping against the sliding door to our tiny balcony. I hoped Diane would be home soon, or at least that she wasn’t caught out in this. It was getting heavier by the second.
The breath caught in my throat as I looked at the search page. The real mirror of Amaterasu. Was it really the real one? I knew the Kami were real—I knew the ink lived in me and in Tomo—but it was still a scary thing to think about, that someone as powerful as Amaterasu had really existed. The paper copy of the goddess, the one whose name I had written with Ikeda in the sketchbook, had already been strong enough to send both Tomo and Jun reeling in the sky. After learning they were descended from Susanou and Tsukiyomi, Tomo and Jun had grown ink wings and fought high above the trees. It was only with Ikeda’s help that we’d summoned Amaterasu’s power to blast them apart and stop them from killing each other.
And that was only the Amaterasu that Tomo had drawn. What about the real one? For anyone to have that amount of power was terrifying. And like Ikeda and Niichan had told me, kami didn’t play by our modern rules of morality. They had their own code entirely of what was right and wrong.
I shut down the search tab and reached for the lid of my laptop, but the news column on my home page made me hesitate. The kanji for death,
Two more Yakuza found dead in Shizuoka. They showed old photos of them, smiling.
I knew that one. The Korean guy with the Mohawk who’d brought the bottle of green tea over when Hanchi was forcing Tomo to draw. His photo smiled back at me, completely unaware of what awaited him in his future.
I scrolled down the news article, much of it still illegible to me with my current kanji-reading abilities. The page showed a photo of the crime scene, a dark graffiti image painted across the rice paper door in the room where they’d died.
A black viper, tall as a person, with ink dripping down his painted fangs.
Oh god.
I grabbed my keitai, my thoughts whirling. I pressed it to my ear, listening to the ring as I held back tears.
His voice was steady, emotionless. “Katie.”
“Jun, please,” I said, holding the phone with shaking hands. “Please stop.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can. You have to.” The rain swelled, beating against my window as the wind whipped the storm around.
“Katie, these aren’t innocent people, you know. We’ve talked about this. The world is better off without them.”
“That’s what courts are for,” I said, the tears streaming down my face. “I should call the police.”
His voice softened, warmth seeping in. “They won’t believe you.”
“That’s why I’m asking you to stop. Please.”
A pause. “It’s not in my hands anymore.”
“I don’t get it.” And then it dawned on me. His followers. “Wait...is your Kami cult helping you?”
“Katie, I...”
The rain pummeled my window as I jumped to my feet. “I thought you said most of them weren’t strong enough for their sketches to lift off the page!”
“They’re not, but...when Amaterasu showed me the mirror, the truth about who I really was, I felt the shift. I felt the power of Susanou awaken in me. It’s affecting them, too. They grow stronger being near me, the way Yuu and I were affected by you.”
Ishikawa was right. It was war, and Jun had his own army. Could you fight death sketched on a page? How do you catch the murderer? How do you protect the victim? My mind raced.
Jun’s voice turned gentle and patient. “Katie, the Kami are rising. It’s a new world now, and we don’t need these scum polluting it. Listen...almost every religion in the world talks of a final judgment, right?” He laughed, the sound of it jarring in my ears. How the hell could he laugh at a time like this? “I’m the heir of Susanou. This is my fate. It’s always been my fate.” I collapsed onto my bed, the rain outside nearly overcoming the sound of Jun’s voice. “I’m the heir to the ruler of Yomi, the World of Darkness. The Judge. I will fulfill my purpose until the end.”
“Not like this,” I pleaded. “That can’t be what it means. You don’t have to do this. You can choose your own fate.”
His calm voice cracked open, his voice tinged with panic. “It’s not like I want to do this, okay? Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do.”
This was the real Jun, now. This was the guy who’d rescued me in Oguro, the one who’d asked me out for coffee. But then I realized, fear creeping up my spine—the other side of him was just as real, wasn’t it? They were both him.
“But Tomo is fighting his fate.”
“Tomo is the descendent of Tsukiyomi. Don’t you get it? Tsukiyomi lost his mind and murdered the other kami. What do you think is going to happen with Yuu?” My heart froze; I collapsed onto my knees, the hard tatami pressing lines into my skin. Murdered the kami? Is that what had happened to Tsukiyomi? Is that what would happen to Tomo? “It can’t go on forever like this. You always knew it would end. He’s a monster that should never have existed. A monster who wished to be human. Sore dake. That’s all.”
I clutched the phone as the rain poured. Everything was changing. Everything was ending.
There is only death.
I took a deep breath. “You’re a monster, too, Jun.”
“Gomen,” Jun said, his voice a whisper
