She finished quickly, rinsed out her mouth, and wiped a trace of toothpaste from her lips with a facecloth. Washing her face would have to wait. Kara pulled open the bathroom door and hurried into the living room to find her very sleepy-looking father talking to an anxious Miss Aritomo. The art teacher appeared distraught, and both of them glanced up as Kara entered.
“Dad?” she ventured, a knot of dread in her gut. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Yuuka… I mean, Aritomo-sensei…,” he began.
“I had some upsetting news,” the woman said, picking up where her father faltered. “I went out for a walk, thinking it might ease my mind, and when I found myself passing your house, I realized that your father would want to know, and that it would be nice to have someone to talk to.”
Despite her reservations about the burgeoning relationship between her father and her art teacher, Kara truly liked Miss Aritomo. Seeing her so obviously troubled, it only reminded Kara how kind the woman had been to her from the very first time they met, and she felt badly about the distance she had begun to put between them.
“Are you all right?” Kara asked, going to her, even as her father closed the front door. “What news?”
The two adults exchanged glances, a silent communication, both hesitating to tell her what had transpired. Hideous thoughts filled her head as she thought of the monstrous ketsuki, the demonic thing that had killed several students earlier in the year.
Kara started to shake her head. “Please tell me nobody’s dead,” she said in a tiny voice.
Miss Aritomo blinked at this, then began to shake her head as well. “No, no. It isn’t that. At least, I pray that it isn’t.”
Kara’s father put a hand on her shoulder. “One of Aritomo-sensei’s Noh club students, a boy who lives on the other side of the city, hasn’t come home tonight. His mother called the school. She’s very upset, of course. But it’s much too early to assume anything has happened to him.”
He seemed to be speaking to Miss Aritomo as much as he was to Kara now, comforting them both.
“The boy might have fallen off his bike and been hurt, or he could simply be at a party. Or, worse, perhaps he’s run away. But don’t jump to conclusions. There’s no reason to think horrible thoughts.”
Kara knew her father was probably right, but she had to force herself to smile. No, no reason at all. Unless you’ve been cursed.
4
T here were no bad dreams that night, but Kara slept even worse than she had the night before. Wednesday morning found her tired and frayed, wiping the grit of fitful sleep from her eyes, her head aching just enough to annoy her, but not enough for her to justify staying home from school. Especially not today.
The skies were a wan gray and the air thick with humidity as she walked from her house down the street toward the campus. Off to her left, a narrow, dead-end road led partway down along the bay shore, a place for people to stop and admire Ama-no-Hashidate, or to walk down to the water and take a quick swim or skip stones. Beyond the road’s end, a broad swath of the school grounds touched the shore, and then there were trees in the distance, bordering the property. Sakura’s sister, Akane, had been murdered there, on the grassy shore.
The violence of Akane’s murder had combined with Sakura’s grief and rage to draw the attention of the demon Kyuketsuki, who had languished in the spirit world, or in some odd limbo where old gods went to die. The demon’s once-great power had withered over the centuries, diminished by time and the absence of belief. To most Japanese, it was only a story now, only a character on the Noh stage. The events of the previous fall and spring had begun to open a window for it to return, but Kara, Miho, Sakura, and Hachiro had closed that window.
Kyuketsuki had cursed them all. Despite the August heat and the humidity, Kara shuddered as she walked through the archway at the edge of the campus and up the pathway toward the school. She could still remember, word for word, what the demon had said to them.
Little remains in the world now of the darkness of ancient days… but what there is will come to you, and to this place. All the evil of the ages will plague you, until my thirst for vengeance is sated.
There might not be many supernatural evils left on Earth, but Kyuketsuki had basically put a bounty on their heads, marked them all for death. All the evil of the ages was a pretty broad statement. They’d lived in fear for the first month, and in a kind of cold, numb dread for the second.
But after a while, with no sign of any attack, or anything at all out of the ordinary, it had been easy to believe the curse meant nothing, that maybe whatever evils of the ages might still be around, they had either withered in power like Kyuketsuki, or they had better things to do.
Now this kid, Daisuke Sasaki, had gone missing.
As soon as she’d woken up this morning, Kara had asked her father if he had heard anything more, but he had not. Miss Aritomo had left after midnight-and Kara didn’t even want to think about what they had been doing in the meantime, with her dad comforting the art teacher. When Miss Aritomo had finally left the house, Kara had peeked out the window, her bedroom lights off, and seen them kissing. Erase, erase, erase. She didn’t want to think about her father kissing someone other than her mom. It had gotten under her skin, and the memory of it haunted her, but she had other concerns right now.
She needed to talk to her friends, and to find out if this Daisuke had gotten home. Kara thought she had met him a couple of times. With the way the rehearsals for the play worked-the performers practicing in isolation-it was no surprise that she didn’t really know him. But Miho would.
Other students migrated toward the school, both boarders who streamed around the side from the dormitory beyond the main building and commuters who arrived by train or bus or bicycle, and even some who-like Kara-came by foot. At the bottom of the steps she paused to glance once more at the overcast sky. No distant thunder today, nor even any ominous threat of rain, just a gray shroud that looked as though it had always been there, and might never leave.
Hurrying up the stairs, she walked into the genkan, a large foyer whose walls were lined with cubbyholes where the students stored their street shoes. Inside the school building, they wore slippers called uwabaki, pink for girls and blue for boys, which always made Kara think of the way parents seemed to color-code newborn babies.
Amid the milling students, she searched for her friends. As she took off her shoes and stuffed them into a cubby, she kept glancing around, but at first saw no sign of them. Kara felt odd, her skin prickling with tension. She was in school, but felt apart from the other students. When she caught sight of bitchier-by-the-day Mai making a beeline toward her, she wished she could have been anywhere else.
“What happened to him, bonsai?” Mai said, her voice low, expression grim. She glanced around to make sure no one would overhear them. “Do you know where he is?”
A tremor passed through Kara. She knew exactly what Mai was talking about, but not why the girl would be asking her.
“Are you on drugs?” Kara asked, speaking loud enough to be overheard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mai hesitated, nostrils flaring with anger, eyes dark. Then she took a breath, and Kara could see beneath the nasty mask the girl had adopted in order to become queen of the soccer bitches. Mai had been quiet and unsure, once upon a time. That girl still lived inside this one. Kara got a glimpse of her, and realized that Mai was afraid.
“Ume told me what happened that night,” Mai whispered. She leaned in close and Kara flinched. “About Kyuketsuki. So don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m asking you. Where is Daisuke?”