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Wide, waxy leaves rustle lazily overhead, swaying languorously in the breeze. Patches of light dance and flicker on the ground, winking in and out like stars veiled by a shifting cloud bank. The smell of the earth under his hands is muted. Birdsong, the cicadas’ shrieking, and the low whistling of the wind is muted. The little pinpricks of heat on his back from the sun, he can’t feel them now.
“Careful, Seiji. You don’t need to press the stick in so hard; you’ll just break it.” Sayaka leans over and guides her son’s hand away from the circle he’s been drawing at her instruction. Her hand on his is almost shockingly cool, soft apart from the calluses that have formed on parts of her fingers and palms. The same places where calluses have formed on his hands, he thinks, but he can’t be certain. It’s been too long. She smiles down at him in a thin sliver of teeth. “You won’t get the best results unless the depth of the lines are relatively uniform.”
He doesn’t reply to the admonition with words; scratching out lines and symbols more lightly should suffice. He knows not to make the same mistake twice. But as the face of the circle starts to take on a more complete shape, something starts to nag at him, in the back of his mind. “Mother… I haven’t seen this circle before. It’s not in any of the books I’ve read.”
Sayaka smiles again, a touch more widely. “I was wondering if you would notice; good. No, Seiji, you wouldn’t have seen this in any of the books. This is something of my own invention.”
Now, that is a little surprising. Exorcists are known to tweak spells or add personal touches to formulas to get a somewhat different result from the standard. Different clans have different variations on incantations and guard them as closely as they do any other secret. But creating incantations and spell circles wholesale privately, unaided, is not exactly encouraged, not if his father periodically reminding him never to do that without help is any indication.
“You look surprised.”
“Father said…”
The smile fades from her lips. “I know what your father told you, Seiji. I’ve tested everything I’ve created. It all works. Trust me, sweetheart; I wouldn’t teach you any of it if I wasn’t sure that it will work.”
‘Trust me.’ He narrows his eyes slightly, trying not to let a frown steal over his mouth. “…Mother… Why are you showing this to me?” Why…
Sayaka stares at him in silence, her gaze that of someone who knows. He was never able to keep secrets from her, not for long; he remembers that. She always just seemed to know. He doesn’t know why; maybe their minds run such similar tracks that she could just guess his train of thought from guessing what she would think, in his place.
Finally, she smiles, slowly, her thin, reddish lips unfurling like ribbons. “I will share what I’ve learned with who I choose to share it with. I would like at least one person to know, and you are my child. Besides, you can never know too much. You’re going to need to know everything you can if you want to get—“
“—get off?”
The shifting, dappled light vanished like the melting of frost under a weak spring sun. Birdsong, cicadas’ shrieking, his mother’s voice, were replaced with the rattling hum of a bus engine and the clatter of shoe soles on the grooved metal steps. One of the other passengers, a man with an only vaguely familiar face, stood over him. “Isn’t this where you get off?”
Seiji blinked, his head still heavy with sleep. The dark outside sucked up the harsh fluorescent light inside the bus, but he could make out a familiar stand of trees, a familiar hard-packed earth path, even without time for his eyes to adjust. He smiled smoothly, sleep forgotten, dream-memory vivid as it had been when he lived it, even the dead patches in memory vivid for arsenic-bitterness. “It is. Thank you.”
-0-0-0-
Seiji’s father didn’t lock his office door when he was away on business. Someone might need to go into the office to get something, or he might lose his key (Or have it stolen from him). It just wasn’t practical, and the chances of someone carrying out a successful infiltration and theft were infinitesimal. The door stayed unlocked.
And indeed, no one paid it any mind when Seiji went into his father’s office. That was as commonplace as the door being left unlocked; no one bothered to register the head’s son going into the head’s office.
Nanase-san might have asked, he allowed. Nanase did tend to register things that flew over everyone else’s heads. But she wasn’t here right now, either.
Once inside, the door shut behind him, Seiji began scanning the bookcase behind the desk, while listening for any sound of footsteps outside the door. If someone else came inside (someone human; an ayakashi might just turn back around and wait outside), they would probably at least ask him what he was looking for, if nothing else. It would be better to be prepared for that, better to have a safe answer ready, something that would satisfy curiosity but not pique further interest. His mother had been a private person—while she was, Seiji had learned from overheard gossip after her death, notorious for her experimentation, she had not been inclined to share her materials or the results of said experimentation—but there was always the chance that someone might correctly intuit what it was he held in his hands.
Finally, he found it, wedged in at the edge of the third row from the ground, so tight that it couldn’t even slide all the way onto the shelf—a nondescript black notebook, the covers slightly dog-eared. Seiji turned it over and over again, running his hand over the scratched front cover. He hooked his fingernails over the edge of the notebook, grappling with the urge to sit down and start reading the book right there.
More… There was more than one of these notebooks. She’d written in them in front of him, sometimes, long strands of hair sliding over her shoulders as she hunched over. There were a few black notebooks, but at least one green and one blue as well. She’d tap her pen against the margin of the page, and snap the book shut and laugh at him when he’d try to sneak a glimpse at what was written inside. “You’ll have to be quicker than that!” she’d said, a far cry from what she said whenever his father grew curious about what she was writing. Seiji knew the other notebooks weren’t in the archives; he’d already checked.
But there were no more notebooks to be found on the shelves here. Seiji went from shelf to shelf, peering intently at the books for any sign of a notebook stuffed behind them, and found nothing. Maybe the rest are still in Father’s room, he wondered, but balked at the thought of searching through his parents’, now just his father’s room. That would draw much more attention than going into his father’s office would, and…
No. This would be enough.
-0-0-0-
Seiji’s parents had almost always taken care not to argue in front of him. More than that, they took care not to argue in front of anyone. The head and his wife needed to present a united front to the world; any crack, however small, was a doorway in. Matoba Sayaka never gainsaid her husband in public, and Matoba Kazuya had nary a hard word for his wife in public. Away from the public, that was mostly true as well. They rarely fought, or at least, Seiji had rarely ever heard them fight. But Sayaka’s experiments, whatever they were, were different.
When she was alive, Seiji had only known it from the notebooks. She was always writing in them when she had a spare moment—not around outsiders, not around the rest of their clan, not even around Nanase, whom his mother did seem to trust, but around him, and his father. Well, his father at first. Kazuya did get curious about just what it was she was writing, just what it was that had her wandering off into the woods for hours on end; not caring about such things gets you nowhere. They were not rivals, and neither of them harbored any loyalties they had not been born with. Asking outright must have seemed reasonable.
Sayaka laughed it off the first few times, though Seiji could see a hard, brittle sheen like glass form over her eyes, or could see his father’s knuckles grow white if he happened to be watching him instead. This show of good humor did not last long, and her deflections grew defensive, her voice pitching high and her hands snapping shut about her notebook like twin vices.
Eventually, Kazuya stopped asking, though he eyed her current notebook dubiously every time he happened to catch her writing in it. “There are some people you should never give orders to,” he had told Seiji one day, apropos of nothing, but Seiji could guess at his motives. Sayaka came to only write when she was alone, or alone with her son, who had learned not to ask.
Maybe Father had known he’d learn everything eventually. Maybe he told himself that she wouldn’t be here to guard her notes forever—but if Kazuya had ever told himself those things, their fulfillment must have been as ash in his mouth, when the day had come.
And Seiji supposed he would have to wait as well, if he wanted to read the rest. I’m waiting for someone to die so I can read some books. His stomach lurched a little at that, his mouth forming a twisted, uneasy smile. Whenever an exorcist died with no heirs to claim their materiel, or no heirs who wanted to claim their materiel, the squabbling over spoils could last for months, to be resolved by bribes or threats or some long-coveted concession, or sometimes by theft. For Seiji, things would be much simpler. Unless Father burned the others, and only kept this one.
He took his reading outside, settling down by a bed of purple asters that shivered in the breeze, his back pressed up against the cracked bark of a pine tree. Out in the sunlight some of the children were playing, a mix of Seiji’s maternal cousins, paternal cousins’ children, and more distant relations come down from the mountains for the day. Any adult who saw him would assume he’d been appointed chaperone, babysitter, or what have you, and the ayakashi would not ask questions. The children were young enough that, if they grew curious enough to ask questions, they’d believe him when he said he was doing schoolwork. They were still trusting, that way. (And the book bag would help.)
Nevertheless, Seiji propped the notebook up on his knees, close to his chest, and cracked it open only part ways. If one of them happened to come over and catch even a passing glimpse of the pages, they might still relate what they’d seen to their parents, even innocently.
His mother’s scrawl, gleaming faintly in black or blue ink, was immediately familiar to him, even if he couldn’t remember where the calluses on her hands had been. At least my memory hasn’t completely failed me. Her notes spilled over nearly every inch of the paper he had opened to—notes in the margin (no heading), a few notes on the slick inside cover, written in shorthand and so badly smudged as to be nearly completely illegible. There were no dates written on any of the pages Seiji flipped to, no subject headings. How did she keep track of anything? Did she have to thumb endlessly through the pages to find something, or did she just have to crack open a notebook to a random page, and there was what she wanted to read?
For me, the best place to start will be the beginning.
The beginning, Seiji soon discovered, wasn’t an actual beginning. The first line on the first page started mid-sentence, and given that there was no evidence of there once having been a page before it, it looked as though Sayaka had been treating the books as a single ‘narrative.’ This one could have been written two years ago or ten years ago, and the books it continues are hidden or gone. He started reading on the second sentence.
In this notebook, at least, Sayaka had been taking note of everything. She dissected the spells used to bind or kill ayakashi, the spells that gave sealing jars and other containers their strength, the spells used to empower wards. Where did the power behind incantations come from? Where was the lynchpin in circles, the thing that could make or break an exorcist’s attempt at a spell? Where was power really located? In the blood, the voice, the eyes? What could be changed, made stronger?
Beyond this, she’d made some initial stabs at new spells in the first few pages of the notebook, whether cannibalized from other spells or created whole cloth. There were quotations Seiji recognized from some of the books in the archives, formulas he recognized from old lessons. Speculation about phases of the moon and alignments of the stars, things his father would have written off as nonsense in a second, and things Seiji had to call far-fetched. Even Sayaka seemed to have considered it dubious, for by it she had written, “But I’m not certain it’s best to rely on such things. I’ve never noticed a difference, personally.”
Seiji read on slowly, going from page to page, occasionally following arrows forwards or backwards. Had he not known his mother’s handwriting, not known her reputation, there would be nothing to tell him that this notebook had ever belonged to Matoba Sayaka. She hadn’t written her name in the front or back covers; indeed, had not seemed to have supplied identifying information anywhere in the book. She spoke of herself not at all on a personal level. There was no mention of her brother or his children, young as they were, and younger still when she was alive. No mention of her husband, or her son.
He blinked, and frowned. Did you expect anything more? a chiding voice called from the back of his head. These are research notes, not a diary. You find notes in the one, and personal thoughts in the other. Don’t look for one or the other where it doesn’t belong.
It was his mother’s research he wanted to read. That was what he’d wanted. Still, Seiji wondered briefly if, when his father had read through this same notebook (he must have; he couldn’t possibly have left any of them alone, if it was possible they contained something valuable), he’d been disappointed when he saw that all it held was notes. Even if only for a moment.
When next Seiji looked up from his reading, he started a little, surprised to see the sun sinking behind the steep hills and the long shadows waking from daytime slumber. The children had all gone inside; he’d not heard when their shrieks of laughter had died out. Seiji got to his feet, tucking the notebook away in his book bag. He’d just as soon avoid someone catching sight of what he was reading when they came to tell him to come inside, lest he miss supper or get locked out of the main house.
-0-0-0-
It was night, and the moon and stars were shrouded by thick gray clouds moving out of the west. Seiji’s father wasn’t back yet—wouldn’t be home for a couple of days at least, at last check. Well, that did give him more time to read, to copy down anything that might be useful before he had to put the notebook back where he had found it.
Seiji sat in the small, shallow pool of golden light cast by his lamp. Outside the range of its light, everything was dull and monochrome, black and gray and shifting shadows on the walls. He listened for any sound out in the hall—it wasn’t likely that anyone would come inside, but better to be prepared to turn off the lamp and stow the notebook under his sheets. But he never heard anyone passing by his door, and his reading went uninterrupted.
Sayaka had been prone to repeating herself. He hadn’t noticed it that afternoon, but he hadn’t gotten that far while the sun was still up, and it wasn’t like she repeated herself on a single page, or even once every five pages. Instead, Seiji was about thirty pages in, and was coming across passages that looked familiar to him, familiar because he’d already read them earlier on in the notebook. Not repeated verbatim, perhaps, but any of Seiji’s teachers would have cited her for plagiarism for providing these notes without citations.
I suppose I’ve figured out how she kept track of information without headings or dates, he mused, frowning slightly. Though it seems like a waste of page space to me. He wondered if all of the notebooks were like this—up to a quarter of what was written down being redundant information, repeated over and over again so she wouldn’t have to flip back ten or fifteen or twenty pages to read what she had already written. Maybe that’s why Father only left this notebook out where anyone could get to it; the rest might not have had any unique information in them at all. But somehow, Seiji doubted that was the answer. Things were rarely ever that simple.
Most of what was written down now was, apart from the repeated information, more involved attempts at new spells than what Seiji had found in the beginning of the notebook. At least, that was what he thought most of it was—the ink was so badly smudged in places that he couldn’t read any of what was written, or Sayaka’s handwriting was so garbled that Seiji could only read it with difficulty, or not at all.
What I’m trying to read right now might not even be viable. He’d come upon different versions of the same spell more than once, so far. The later versions were more complete than what had come before them, or had had certain parts of the formula altered or excised, or something. I could try to use one of these spells, only to have nothing happen—or for it to backfire on me. Seiji would just as soon he didn’t have to deal with a spell out of this notebook backfiring when he tries to use it. It had been a long time since he’d last botched a spell whose efficacy he was sure of badly enough to have to deal with a backfire. It would raise too many questions if he showed signs of spell damage, and the idea of saying that he’d just been careless rankled.
Did she try to write some of this in the dark? The thing about having few people she was willing to write around, while living in a house full of people, was that Sayaka would not have found much time to write. Asides from when she was with him, there would have been the times when she was alone in the forest, when his father was away on business and she had their room to herself, or when she was out on assignment by herself and had to rent a hotel room. Did she write these entries the same way he was reading them now, sitting in a shallow pool of light in the dark, squinting and blinking away tiredness, anxious to get just one more paragraph written, just one more line?
Seiji looked away from the notebook, to the dark window. The light blurred the image, so that all he could see was darkness and the vague suggestion of trees. There had been another night like this, once. The day that had come before the night, there had been another like it, once.
He had come home from school to find the house in a state of complete disarray—people hurrying back and forth between rooms whose doors they quickly shut behind them, ayakashi skirting the edges of the shadows, flinching away when he looked at them questioningly. No one would meet his gaze, no one would explain what was going on. It was only when Seiji found his father that finally he had an explanation, and an hour of fraught silence passed between them before his father spoke at all.
The wake was a few nights later. At the end, for the long vigil, it was just him and his father. His mother’s brother and his wife were out of town on assignment, and couldn’t return without breaking the terms of their contract. Their children were far too young to sit up through the whole night. Sayaka’s parents had both predeceased her. There was no one but Seiji and his father who was close kin enough to sit through the night.
The casket was shut. Kazuya wouldn’t let him see her. He remembered wishing he could, remembered wishing he could even bring himself to ask to be allowed to see her, but Seiji had held back. He did not fear the face of death; he had known death since he was very young. He was not afraid. But when he looked at the closed casket, it was as though every dark dream he had ever had had taken residence under the wooden lid. He still dreamed about it, sometimes, what must have been waiting inside. Whatever it was, it wasn’t her, not her as she had been.
As the sky grew darker, the hall where the wake was held grew quieter, and emptier. Friends, colleagues, kin, they had filtered outside at a trickle, and they took their shadows with them, but somehow, the shadows at the walls grew thicker and darker with each warm body that left. Seiji said nothing, only acknowledging one of his small cousins with a half-hearted smile when she stood on tiptoe and whispered condolences in his ear. He found himself trying to remember what he and his mother had said to each other the last time they spoke, and failed. He found himself trying to remember what the color of her kimono had been, and failed. The still air was stale and clinging. The pale flowers by the bier had barely any scent, and yet somehow their scent was overpowering, leaving him so dizzy that he thought that if he left his chair, he’d just fall to the floor, and never get up again.
He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. His mother deserved better than that. But at some point during the night, Seiji’s drooping eyelids finally fell shut, and he fell into an uneasy sleep plagued by the whispered suggestion of dreams. When he finally woke up, the sky was no longer black but a stormy bluish-gray, tinged with purple, choked with clouds. His father’s arm was wrapped around his shoulders, and he behaved as though nothing was strange when Seiji stared up at him. He wondered why his father had let him sleep instead of shaking him awake, still wondered why, but he never asked that, either.
A few more pages in to the notebook, and Seiji stopped seeing spell formulas, and started seeing spell circles instead. Seiji straightened, narrowing his eyes as he looked them over. The first two had large Xs drawn through them. The third was scribbled out. The fourth was Xed out, and had a note written beneath it reading: ‘DIDN’T WORK. AYAKASHI ESCAPED. BURNED MYSELF.’
I never noticed any—
Focus.
The next few spell circles weren’t Xed out, weren’t defaced in any way. There were only small check marks in the bottom right hand corner to signal that they worked, but that was enough.
Now these, I can use. Seiji reached for pen and paper. It was late, but not so late that he couldn’t accurately copy down spell circles for later use, and the quick descriptions of what they were and what they did. He’d have to put the notebook back before his father got home; there might be a lot of books in his office, but Seiji wasn’t willing to take the chance that he’d check for it, and notice it gone. At least I’ve gotten something out of it I can be sure of.
She’d wanted him to know this; she’d taught him some of it, though Seiji had seen none of the spells or charms Sayaka had created and taught him in this notebook. It wasn’t stealing, not if she had wanted him to know it.
He wondered briefly if she had felt the sting of his lapse, wherever she was. Pen paused over paper, but only for a moment.
-0-0-0-
“I don’t need you following me around, you know,” Shuuichi told him, more mildly than he had the last time Seiji had met up with him while he was out on an assignment, though there was still a noticeable bite to his voice as they descended the hill. He jerked his glasses off of his face (no grace, not an ounce of grace in him, but there was something oddly reassuring about that) and put them back inside of the battered tie-dye case Seiji had laughed at him for picking at the thrift shop. “I can do this by myself.”
“Did you even notice me at all before you sealed that ayakashi?”
Shuuichi frowned instead of giving a straight answer, which told Seiji everything he needed to know, really. (He’d learn.) “I can handle this stuff without you skulking around the woods when I go out. Seriously, Seiji.”
Seiji shrugged and let a small smile come to his lips. “If you don’t want me hanging around, run me off. That seems simple enough.”
Shuuichi rolled his eyes. “You’d just come back.”
“Would I?” Seiji asked softly, studying Shuuichi’s face from out of narrowed eyes. His jaw wasn’t clenched, not exactly, but the line was sharper than it would have been when relaxed. “You think so?”
“Yeah, Seiji, I do. And I can do this better without you hovering, too.”
“If you didn’t even notice me, it doesn’t count as hovering.”
“You know what I mean!”
“Well, I’m sorry if I’ve been giving you stage fright.”
Shuuichi opened his mouth as if to say something, but after taking a look at Seiji’s face, clamped it shut and shook his head, his mouth twisted in a strange line.
The nearest bus stop was half a mile from the base of the hill, a ramshackle, rusted thing at the end of a cracked, dusty road. Seiji was going the same way Shuuichi was, if a fair bit further, so when Shuuichi dropped his bag on the bench and sat down, Seiji followed suit, only pausing a moment to eye the satchel set down between them.
All was silent, but for the low, hollow voice of the wind through the trees. They were far from town, far from the cacophony of car horns and screeching tires and mingled voices. Even birdsong was only a distant suggestion, heard faintly from far away. I could hear someone coming from a mile away, unless they were very quiet—or an ayakashi who didn’t want me to know they were coming.
Seiji slid his mother’s battered black notebook out from his book bag. He knew it was a risk to take it out of the house; he’d caught an exorcist’s shiki trying to steal his things on their master’s orders more than once (Probably looking for talismans in his social studies notes, or something like that). But he didn’t have much time before his father came home, and besides…
He could barely concentrate on his reading this time, and knew it was better not to expose too many of the pages anyways. He gave Shuuichi a sideways glance from time to time, trying to gauge if he was showing any interest, and if so, what he was doing about it.
But Shuuichi didn’t seem to even notice that Seiji had pulled anything out of his book bag. Instead, he stared off into the distance, his brown eyes glazed with exhaustion. The ayakashi that lived in his skin ventured out from under his shirt collar, twitching slightly, before darting out of sight again.
You need to pay attention. It’s not enough to keep your eyes open at a meeting. Seiji was tempted to wave the notebook in Shuuichi’s face, but he didn’t think that would really help. He had a feeling he knew what this, what Shuuichi would call “not poking his nose where it doesn’t belong,” and Seiji called “a miserable lack of curiosity,” came from, and had no real desire to pry into that. He’ll figure it out. And when he does, I can’t—
“Interesting reading?”
Of course, Seiji had been wrong before.
Shuuichi was looking at him, his eyebrows raised slightly. Not at the book, not trying to catch a glimpse of the pages—at Seiji’s face. For a moment, Seiji was caught, neither moving nor speaking, just looking back. The wind died out of his hearing, and instead there was the staccato thump-thump-thump of his blood coursing through his veins. The lapse was momentary, and soon his mind was moving again. Whether this was courtesy or more “not poking his nose where it doesn’t belong” on Shuuichi’s part, Seiji couldn’t tell. It could just be carelessness born of tiredness; his eyes were still drooping a little, though he seemed more alert.
He snapped his book shut as a thin smile crept over his face. “You could call it that. I suppose it depends on what your definition of ‘interesting’ is.”
“Well, what is it?” Now, a gleam of curiosity shone in Shuuichi’s eyes. “School notes?”
For a moment, Seiji found himself with the truth clinging to his tongue. He blinked, surprised at himself, his stomach starting to churn slightly. If he told Shuuichi the truth, he might keep the secret. Today, tomorrow, the next week, the next month, he might. Shuuichi was still the sort of person who would do that, keep the secret and keep it in the spirit it was intended, without breaking it open and feasting on its marrow. But the next year? The next five years? Who could say for sure.
He’ll learn. He wants to keep on being an exorcist, and I don’t think anyone’s going to succeed in scaring him off at this point. If he wants to be one of us, he’ll have to learn.
I want—
“I don’t think it’s anything you’d be interested in,” Seiji said, with the barest suggestion of a laugh lingering in his throat, not quite escaping into the open air. He felt his smile curdle. “You’d be bored to tears going through this.”
Seiji must have imagined the broken-glass-sharp edge in his voice, however much it might have cut his tongue, for Shuuichi, normally so sensitive to tone, did not stiffen and straighten as he would have when he heard such a tone enter Seiji’s voice. He rolled his eyes again, a smile tugging on the corner of his mouth. “I won’t keep you from it.”
Himself, Seiji almost wished Shuuichi had tried to force the issue. Almost. He knew what was good for him, what was good for his kin. He knew his mother would never have wanted an outsider looking over her work. Never let anyone say he didn’t. I don’t want anything.
-0-0-0-
“Mother?”
The setting has shifted. The sun has wheeled overhead many times, and the leaves still clinging to the trees are dry, brown things that rattle and shudder in the slightest of breezes. There is a smell of wet, decaying leaves underfoot that’s missing. There’s a chill wind cutting through the trees that’s missing, though he can remember shuddering when it cut through him like scissors through tissue paper. The sun is setting over the mountains slowly, orange rays shooting through the trees.
She does not seem to hear him, and he reaches up and tugs on her haori. A rich blue, it is, dappled with yellow flowers. Its color will have faded when he finds it in his parents’ wardrobe years later, but it feels just the same when he crushes the fabric in his hands.
That gets her attention. She looks down at him and smiles. “What is it, sweetheart?” There is a dreamy, distant timbre to her voice—she is there with him and yet not, her mind drifting far away.
“Why have you been making everything you taught me?” And everything you haven’t shown me? he thinks, though he hides the words behind his teeth. If she thinks he’s getting too inquisitive, she might stop teaching him anything at all.
She laughs, high and bright. “Well, that’s easy! I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out for yourself.”
He scrunches his face, blinks owlishly up at his mother. It’s hard to tell when she’s teasing, sometimes. He’s old enough now that he ought to be able to tell, but then, this is his mother. She’s too tricky for adults, sometimes. And if it really is something obvious…
Taking his silence for something needing clarification, Sayaka kneels down in front of him, taking his hands in her own, much larger ones. “It’s simple, Seiji,” she tells him earnestly. Her smile softens slightly, but her eyes gleam. “You know an exorcist needs every trick they can learn, don’t you?” When he nods, she goes on, “That’s even more true for us. I…” She stares over his head, and for a moment, her eyes glaze over, before clearing. “…I think it’s best if I understand as much as I can about the world around us. And I know I’ll be a better exorcist for better understanding why things work the way they do, and making some things of my own.”
He nods. “Okay, that makes sense.” It does, to an extent; he knows he wouldn’t have history lessons if he wasn’t meant to understand why things are the way they are. But her drive to create doesn’t make quite as much sense, when none of the things she’s shown him have been all that different from what he was already learning from others.
“Does it?” There is laughter in her voice, but little in the way of laughter in her eyes. “Well, it will make more sense as you get older. Just remember.” She gives his hands a gentle squeeze. “You always have to be sharp. If you cross swords with someone sharper than you, that could end pretty badly.”
“Yes, Mother,” he says seriously. That is one piece of advice he will never have trouble remembering.
-0-0-0-
Sayaka’s spells worked just as she had always said they would.
In the end, it had seemed to Seiji more prudent to wait until he got another assignment to test anything he’d gleaned from his mother’s notebook. Going out and testing the results of his research on random ayakashi had the potential to draw more attention to himself than he currently wanted. If he was on assignment, then he was supposed to be sealing or killing ayakashi, and if he was alone, and careful enough not to act in front of witnesses who could bear tales back home or abroad, then no one need ever know.
Permeating the air was the acrid reek of burning, and the occasional guttural shriek that grew fainter with each passing minute. At the start, the ayakashi had used words to express its rage, its agony, but words had failed it soon enough. This was the end destined for it, the moment Seiji got his assignment—now the only thing left to do was observe, and stay out of the range of teeth and talons while it still drew breath.
Soon, those cries ceased altogether, leaving only the reek of burning, and a dark scorch mark that stood out as a bruise on the soft green grass.
It works. His heart throbbed painfully; a high-pitched, giddy laugh tore from his throat. Seiji knelt down by the scorch mark and pressed a finger to the ashes. He winced when his finger was stung, and quickly drew his hand away, but that could not put out his faintly breathless smile.
He wished, briefly, that he could have found the rest of his mother’s notebooks. If he was to use what she had taught him, the full text would have been better. But everyone had to make do with fragments at one point or another, and no one had ever promised him anything but shadows and crumbling history and half-forgotten memories with which to weave the future.