***
We’re not supposed to be at Rock Creek Park at this time of night. The area is closed to visitors until dawn, and I’d get my ass kicked if I was found loitering. I suspect it’s Okiku’s influence that’s always ensured I never get caught.
We camp out at our favorite spot—a small clearing with a stream that eventually leads into the Potomac River some miles out. It’s deep enough in the thicket that we’re not visible to roving rangers but not so dense that I’d get lost without my incorporeal companion. I bring a couple of sandwiches in case Ki’s hungry, though she never is.
We never come here for the picnics anyway. We come here for the fireflies.
You don’t usually get large swarms of them in DC, but there’s something about Okiku that they love and that brings them out in droves. They never show until we’re settled in, and then they come creeping out in ones and twos—and then soon enough, there are small clouds made up of fireflies.
I have never seen anything Okiku enjoys more than being the center of these fireflies’ attention. They wind through her hair, braiding into her dark tresses until she’s wearing a crown of stars on her brow. When there’s no one on our list to catch, this is what curbs the whispers in her head, and I’m only too happy to accommodate her.
She’s always so beautiful this way.
As always, we don’t need to talk. We sit and watch the fireflies flutter around Okiku, and once again my hands find hers.
She’s still hurting, I can tell. We aren’t quite okay yet.
But the thing about me and Okiku is that I know we will be.
Chapter Seven
Clues
“This cannot possibly end well,” Callie says.
I respond by dangling the Kewpie doll in her direction. Kagura was quick to explain to me how the ningyō dolls often used in the miko’s rituals are more a matter of aesthetics and formal tradition rather than of necessity. Any doll will do as long as it’s got all its body parts intact.
“You scared of this little thing?” Two years ago, my level of freak-out would have surpassed Callie’s. “I thought you girls loved playing with dolls.”
“Not dolls with evil spirits trapped inside.” Callie swallows. She arrived in Washington, DC, the day before, and we’ll be leaving for Japan tomorrow. “This cannot possibly end well,” she says again.
“Shush.”
Dad is working late, so we’re going out for burgers—right after a quick detour to the nearby cemetery. Callie keeps fidgeting because she’s not used to the smell and the graves, but I’ve done this before. “It won’t be long now. She always comes like clockwork.”
Several minutes roll by, and she appears soon enough. A little old lady materializes out of thin air, hobbling down the road. I wait for her to stop beside a grave several feet from where we’re hiding. She looks down at the tombstone with a peculiar expression on her face, which I’ve learned from experience is just the calm before the storm.
“I don’t see anything,” Callie whispers. She hasn’t seen anything for years, but she still insists on coming along on each hunt I make while she’s visiting, as if her presence can deter horrible things from happening.
“Shush.” Normally, I would leave incorporeal elderly ladies alone, choosing to target the spirits that have real malice in them. But this one is different.
Sure enough, the earsplitting howls start as the old woman begins venting her anger at the tomb’s occupant. I cover my ears and groan. Her unearthly screams are the reason I found her in the first place.
“Tark? What’s wrong?”
“Shush.” I creep out and play the file I’d recorded on my cell phone. Sonorous, melodic chants fill the air. I can’t master all the mantras Kagura and the other mikos have learned since their novitiate days, but I’ve found playing a recording of the hymns they sing works just as well. It doesn’t matter that they’re Buddhist chants and the old lady’s clearly an angry, white American. Kagura says it’s the energy that flows through the song that makes all the difference.
The old woman turns her bulging black eyes to me and shrieks. The chants wrap around her transparent form, making her immobile and helpless. I raise the Kewpie doll, and like a magnet, she is pulled toward it, heaping endless insults at me even as she struggles against the unseen tow. I reel back from the recoil as the doll sucks her in—
She was hiding underneath her kitchen table, clutching her baby tightly to her chest, as gunfire sounded through the clearing outside. She closed her eyes, mouthing wordless prayers as the toddler squirmed and screamed, the sound lost amid the roaring of cannons. Bits of wood and ash rained down from the ceiling. The whole house shuddered and still she prayed—hoping her baby would survive this battle, this war, hoping she would survive. Anger at both the Union and the Confederation alike—