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When he heard the familiar laugh from the end of the alleyway, the fire came to his hands without a second’s thought, well before his brain could even take the sound and attach it to a word as simple as her. He just turned, some instinct faster than language screaming that to have his back to this thing would be his death, and focused on feeding energy to the flame swirling between his fingers.
There was nothing but a wall behind him, tall and too smooth for footholds. The sky above him was empty of tengu or easy escapes. Ahead of him, blocking the last way out, was the figure he remembered too well: a tall white silhouette broken only by black hair and the metallic gleam of shears clutched in an eager hand.
She laughed again, the sound resonant and coy. Paused for a second to tilt her head, hat slipping to an almost jaunty angle. And then she started toward him, heels clicking staccato on the street.
“Akito,” KK said sharply, as if he thought Akito had frozen again, the way he had at the Torii gate. When that paralyzingly strong hand had grabbed him from behind and hoisted him up and around, like he was a fish she’d pulled out of the river on a whim and now needed gutting. “Akito. Twelve o’clock! Either make a move or let me take over!”
But he hadn’t frozen. He was feeling something he couldn’t name, both immersed in the emotion and utterly unaffected by it. A fish, after all, didn’t remark on the presence of water—only its absence. “No need,” he said, the calmest he’d felt in days, and when the fire couldn’t be built any stronger he let it loose.
She stumbled as it hit, but the hole it tore open in her ribcage wasn’t wide enough to expose the heart of her. It would take more than one blast of fire to bare that core of concentrated malice to the open air, where Akito could rip it out and stomp it to dust against the pavement.
It was good, then, that the flames were already building back up between his hands.
Again. Again. Again.
By the time the fire in him had shrunk down to embers, there wasn’t even a core left to crush: just singed shreds of the formerly white coat and a twisted mess of metal only vaguely reminiscent of shears, lingering one last stubborn moment before they too disintegrated into ether.
He was breathing hard. The skin of his face felt tight and uncomfortably dry, as if all the water in him had evaporated in an instant, yet when he went to brush the hair out of his eyes his bangs were limp with sweat against his forehead.
All at once he recognized the emotion he’d been unable to name, drawn so tight around him he couldn’t step back to get a proper look at it. It was a fear fifteen years in the making, and stronger still for all the time he’d spent avoiding its gaze.
A high whistle rang out in his head. “I believe that’s what they call terminated with extreme prejudice,” KK remarked, reluctantly impressed. “No complaints here, but…it’s not like you.”
Akito couldn’t tell if it was meant as a dig or merely an observation. Not that the two were mutually exclusive with KK. The chance of it being the former brought a snappish retort to his lips—something about KK having a high opinion of himself to think he’d got Akito all figured out after a handful of days—but KK was right, in point of fact, and the comment fell away unsaid.
Because these handful of days were enough for Akito in turn to have learned that KK’s blood ran hotter than his. Akito’s first strategy was always avoidance. If he could grapple to a tengu and skip the street corner where Visitors were gathering altogether, he would. When that failed, there was the bow (and was he ever thankful to his high school self for taking afterschool archery club so seriously) or sutras for stealth. If it came to a fight, he favored air and water weaving. They weren’t as lethal, but they were far subtler—and less likely to draw the attention of any nearby mobs of Visitors—than the fire that was KK’s go-to when wired in.
KK seemed to have mixed feelings about his powers, referring to them more than once as something he was stuck with, but he enjoyed using them, too. The visceral anticipatory thrill that flooded Akito’s system when their resonance spiked was proof enough of that. No matter what he might have said, KK missed using his powers. He had to feel helpless enough as it was living with limited influence under Akito’s skin. Being relegated to watching out through Akito’s eyes as he drew on a power that was KK's by rights must have been a frustration on a whole other level.
It made Akito admittedly somewhat prone to wiring in for fights where the boost they got from it wasn’t, strictly speaking, all that necessary to win, just to give KK a moment to fight with him, to feel powerful, to feel autonomous. Sometimes he’d pass control over to KK to handle a particularly complicated seal for much the same reason, and the smooth, practiced competence of the shapes his hands formed under KK’s guidance was something Akito had been trying very hard not to think about.
How quickly he’d gone from resenting this wraith for taking up space in his head to making little gestures to ensure said wraith’s stay was as bearable as possible. How strange that it didn’t feel strange at all.
He wondered if KK had noticed.
“So?” KK prompted. “What’s gotten into you? That Visitor beat you up after school or something?”
He breathed out as slowly as he could stand, looking for control. He’d tried to will the memory out of existence for so long that now that he was called upon to explain he found it too amorphous for language. He had to take another step back and look at the shallowest layer of it before he could unseal his mouth and say anything at all. “Those things make my skin crawl,” was what he muttered at last, and then unzipped the pack against his chest, hoping against hope he still had something even mildly hydrating in there.
“Everything we’ve seen, that’s the one that gets to you? Grade schoolers swap kuchisake onna stories on the playground.”
Okay, that one was definitely a dig. Akito huffed, twisting off the top of the bottled water he’d dug out from the depths of his pack. “Well, which one should 'get to' me, in your expert opinion? And don’t hit me with that I’m a seasoned detective, nothing bothers me bullshit.”
To his credit, KK didn’t even try to posture. “Personally I’d rather face a dozen kuchisake onna at once than tangle with a single jorogumo. We haven’t run into one yet. Kind of hoping we don’t.”
“That’s the giant shapeshifting—”
“Spider, yeah. Don’t even get me started on the nests.”
Akito added it to his mental prayer list for the next offering box they passed: No giant spider demons, please. “Fair enough.”
“Care to change your vote for creepiest Visitor, then?”
“No,” Akito said, and nothing else.
The strange thing was, he kind of did want to talk about it. In terms of people who could understand, he wasn’t likely to ever do better than the ghost living in his head.
He thought about how to bring it up while he towel dried his wet hair before it could drip on his fresh set of clothes. He’d worried that showering would be awkward, given the extra passenger he was toting around, but it had turned out to be a non-issue, KK keeping up a steady stream of conversation throughout as though they were friends hitting up the local bathhouse together. Which was good, because these days Akito was doing a lot of running—and climbing, and fighting, and sweating—and even the constant rain outside could only do so much.
Which also reminded him that even with the extra outfits he’d been picking up from nekomata stalls, he was running out of clean clothes, and at some point soon he was going to need to either raid a department store or find a functioning laundromat and hope that the lunatic who’d kidnapped his sister didn’t finally kickstart his apocalyptic ritual while Akito was waiting for his jeans to dry.
God, but his life was fucking dumb.
He stared vacantly into the mirror of the safe house bathroom as he brushed his teeth, barely even registering the black smoke around one eye anymore. He wondered when other people like them tended to have their first brush with otherworldly entities. “You said you saw a kappa when you were a kid, right?” he said around the brush he’d picked up at the konbini around the corner some days ago.
“Sure did. I was still pretty little, maybe eight or nine.”
“And that’s how you knew you had…” He made a vague sweeping gesture with his unoccupied hand, but KK got it anyway.
“Sort of. It wasn’t seeing the kappa that was proof I had the Affinity. People without it can still usually see yokai—there wouldn’t be so many stories about them otherwise. Visitors, too, unless they’re powerful enough to impact people’s perceptions, which the Affinity can help you see through. Kind of a double-edged sword, though. You seeing them means they’re seeing you. Sometimes I think they’re drawn to people with the Affinity. Maybe our souls are shinier prizes, who knows. ”
Some puzzle pieces were starting to fall into place. A little dizzy, he tried to keep the conversation going. “How many people do have it, then?”
“Impossible to say. Getting any solid statistical data is a nightmare, but Ed’s best guess is that we’re not super common.”
“So wait,” Akito said, backtracking in the conversation, “if it wasn’t seeing the kappa itself that proved you had the Affinity, what was?”
“It was how I found it. I was playing with a group of friends near the riverbank, and there were these funny glowing tracks in the mud that the rest of them kept insisting they couldn’t see. Spectral vision, I learned later. There were no tracks left—they'd been washed away by the rain the night before—but I was still seeing remnants of the kappa's energy. I got fed up with the group after a while and peeled off to go follow the trail myself, and sure enough there was a kappa at the end. I watched it for a bit, then ran to get my Granddad—he’d always told me stories about them, so I thought he’d be excited. But once I told him how I’d found it he was mostly just smug. Turned out he had the Affinity too and had made a lifelong hobby out of kappa hunting. The Affinity skipped his own children, but he’d been on the lookout for signs in me just in case. And he was right.”
Akito put down his toothbrush and reached for a glass to rinse his mouth. “Guess I know where you get it from, then.”
“The Affinity?”
“The smugness.”
“Oh, cute.”
Akito smiled faintly. As impossible as it was, he kept thinking he’d look up in the mirror and see KK standing there with him, maybe leaning back against the wall with crossed arms and trying to look stoic and unamused as they heckled each other. There was something charming about the image. “I thought so.” He hesitated, then ventured, “Are Visitors always aggressive toward humans? Like, do they ever just toy with people for fun, or…give up a hunt halfway, I guess?”
KK didn’t respond right away. Akito had started to learn to identify all the different shades of his silences. The brief ones were usually contemplative, a sign that he was turning two facts around in his detective’s mind and finding that they didn’t quite fit together. “Full of questions tonight, kid. You sure there isn’t something bothering you?”
“There are a lot of things in my life currently bothering me,” Akito said, which was true, but not an answer.
KK knew it, too, but he just sighed and relented. Maybe, like Mari, he had learned that Akito would have tough conversations on his own time or not at all, and wheedling or otherwise pressuring him before he was ready just made him dig his heels in further. “Visitor motivations are foreign to us to say the least. Remember what I said in the hospital? We don’t even know if they ferry captured souls to the underworld or just straight up devour them. Most of the stories we hear of them interacting with humans tend to be violent—dangerous or disfiguring, if not outright fatal—but they’re just that: stories. And what kind of stories do people most like to tell, that get the most traction and the biggest reactions?”
This felt like a conversation he wanted to be sitting down for. “The extreme ones,” he said, retreating out of the bathroom and making for the chair at the workstation.
“Bingo. Bonus points if they’re gory or gruesome. Don’t you fucking dare,” he added as Akito moved to prop his legs up on the desk.
Swallowing a grin, Akito dropped his feet back to the floor and leaned back in the chair. At least he’d taken his shoes off at the door this time.
“Punkass kid. What was I talking about?”
“The stories people tell about Visitors.”
“Right. So, imagine this: maybe one night a woman walking home glances over her shoulder to check if that salaryman who’s been walking behind her for half a mile is actually following her only to realize the guy is missing a face. Terrifying in the moment, but then the guy abruptly turns down a side street and it suddenly seems ridiculous, just the glare from the streetlight. If she tells the story at all, it’s probably commiserating with her friends about the creep who tried to tail her home, not trembling over the faceless terror that seemed to appear straight out of the rain. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but it does mean people like me are less likely to hear about it. Skews our understanding of Visitors’ behavior, and we have jack squat of that to begin with.”
“Sampling bias,” Akito said, remembering a class from what felt like ages ago.
Surprise in KK’s voice. “That’s right. Another statistical nightmare for Ed. Most things in this line of work are.”
“Meaning it is possible. That Visitors don’t always…go for the kill.”
“Seems that way,” KK said, then paused. “So what happened to you?”
Akito straightened in the chair. “I,” he said, and stopped.
“Come on, Akito. You’ve been ruminating so hard I can smell your hair burning.”
Akito was silent for a moment, thinking hard. And then he did his best to explain.
He woke to the sound of footsteps in the hallway. That in and of itself wasn’t unusual. Akito’s mom wasn’t a restful sleeper, and at least once a week she was guaranteed to wake in the middle of the night and have to read a book over a cup of tea for an hour or two before her brain would quiet down long enough to crawl back into bed. Akito, who at seven already had his own struggles sleeping through the night, would sometimes wake in the dark to the soft scuffing of her house slippers on their way to the kitchen. He’d slip out of bed without a thought and meet her there just as she was putting the kettle on. Sometimes the family cat would be there too, waiting primly for one of them to sit down so he could curl himself around their ankles.
“Sorry, Akito,” she’d say, smoothing his hair fondly back with a tired smile. “You got that worrier's brain from me.” She’d pour him a cup too and tell him about the book she was reading, and when he inevitably tired before her she’d walk him back to his room and tuck him in a second time before returning to her tea in the kitchen.
He had worried when Mari was born that his mom wouldn’t have time anymore for this quiet nighttime ritual of theirs, but really Mari’s birth had the opposite effect. Akito, with the anxious mind he’d inherited, was a big brother now, and he took the responsibility seriously. He’d wake up at night with the words fully formed in his head: Mari. Is Mari okay? And when he’d go to check, his mom would be there peering with anxious eyes into Mari’s crib, having had the same thought. Needlessly, it turned out, because Mari had inherited not her mother's worrier's brain but rather her father’s ability to sleep through just about anything. So Akito and his mom would smile at each other, that silent shared recognition that they were being silly, and then they’d retreat to the kitchen for a cup of tea. They both started sleeping better at night when Mari made it to her first birthday without incident, but there was always something else to worry about, and there would always be another night, a new book to talk about, a fresh pot of tea to make.
The footsteps that woke him on this night were wrong, though. Not the soft scuffing he knew, but a sharper tread. The clacking of heels. He couldn’t imagine why his mom would be walking around in shoes indoors, in the middle of the night, unless she had to go somewhere in a hurry and was backtracking through the house in a rush for something she’d forgotten. But where would she go so late? Why? Mari, his brain prompted immediately. Was Mari sick? Was mom taking her to the hospital?
He was tumbling out of bed before he’d even finished the thought. He threw open his door, but before he could barrel out into the hallway something in him wrenched him to a halt, heart lurching sickly in his chest.
The air was cold, and still, and very wrong. Something in the dark was waiting for him, the way a crocodile waits under black water.
Patient. Hungry.
He was staring blankly out into the black and seeing none of it. Afraid of what he would see if he focused his eyes and really looked, but not able to close them either. “Mom,” he whispered, so pitiful a sound his mother couldn’t have heard it if she were standing right next to him. But he told himself that if it didn’t get a response he would step back and close his door. Go back to bed and pull the covers over his head and not move until he heard his dad start the coffeemaker at six.
Nothing. A long, painful moment of it, but it was nothing. Akito’s breath left him in relief, his foot already sliding backward into the safety of the room. And then there was a laugh.
He stopped mid-step, ankle twinging in protest, calf burning. He’d been so convinced that something was there that his brain had invented a noise to prove him right, he told himself. The door was right there under his hand. His bed was feet away.
He might have gone back inside anyway if she hadn’t laughed again. Because it was a woman’s laugh—not his mother’s, warm and a bit self-conscious, always hidden behind a hand—but high and trilling, with a strange resonance to it.
It was coming from the direction of Mari’s room.
“Mari,” he said, a proper sound this time. “Mari!” And he was running, off-kilter in the dark and not caring.
The door to her room was open. His scrambling hands couldn’t find the light switch on the wall. He peered hard into the shadows, but there was nothing amiss. Just the small shape of Mari in her crib, sleeping calmly through her brother’s panicked dash to her doorway.
He stepped backwards out of her room, now confused as much as scared, and turned to look further down the hallway. He knew the laugh had come from this direction. Had it moved further into the house when it heard him running toward it?
The steps he heard then came from behind him, back the way he came, and they were so close he felt the vibrations through the floor. He whirled around, half-ready for nothing but another empty stretch of black.
But she was there, and the sight of her shocked the air from his lungs.
She was tall—taller than his mom, taller even than his dad—and she had to tilt her head sharply down to look at him. To watch him. Her coat and hat were both white, whiter than the printer paper Mari liked to scribble on, so bright she seemed to illuminate the dark around her. She was wearing a mask, like the ones his dad wore when he had a cold but still had to go to work, and it was white too, blending in with the pallor of her skin. Everything about her was white, save for the stringy black hair falling past her shoulders and the icy blue of her eyes.
Eyes open as wide as they would go, pinprick pupils swelling to a black sea as they took him in.
His heart was thrashing hard. It seemed impossible that he would have to be the one to speak. But she didn’t say anything, didn’t even laugh again. Just did something with her hand that made a sound like scissor blades grinding against each other as they opened and closed over empty air.
His mind, satisfied to be proven right in its paranoia, had long since checked out. He was left with a violently pounding heart and a set of lungs desperately trying to get him enough air to speak, to scream, to run. “Hello,” he managed at last, quite insanely, and then, realizing the hour, amended the greeting to a tentative “Good evening?”
That sound of scissors again, almost contemplative. She didn’t return the greeting, but her widened eyes were slowly relaxing into something more natural.
He tried again, pointing to the mask. “Are you sick?”
Against all odds, she smiled at him. He could tell it even through the mask from the crinkles that formed at the corner of her eyes. The honest smile of someone who is delighted by what you've said. Automatically he started to smile back.
And then she reached for the loops around her ears, blood beginning to seep through the mask.
By that point in the story he was wrung dry of emotion. He told KK the rest with the same level of detachment he’d use to summarize a boring movie to a friend:
He’d screamed, of course. Mari, startled awake, had begun to cry. The thing had laughed and vanished neatly into the dark, and by the time his frantic parents had scooped him and Mari into their arms he was hysterical, screaming that they needed to turn on all the lights and get out of the hallway. They managed to calm him and Mari down, tucked between them on the couch of the brightly lit living room while the cat stood sentry on the rug, but then he heard a sound like scissors opening and closing behind his head and was set off all over again, made only worse when his parents, baffled and trying desperately to soothe him, said they hadn’t heard anything.
He made them move rooms, taking even the cat along, and this time it was her laugh. Again, his parents heard nothing, though the cat’s ears flattened severely against his head at the sound and bristled his fur like Akito had never seen. Akito begged them to move rooms again, and it was in his parents’ bedroom that he at last fell asleep shortly before dawn.
Akito’s mother kept him home from school that day. He spent it on the floor of the living room, watching TV in silence with the cat glued firmly to his side. His father came home from work early, tired lines in his face, and sat down next to him to explain, quite gently, what night terrors were. Akito never saw the thing in that house again, but more nights than not he lied awake dreading what might be in the hallway outside his bedroom door until at last he took to sleeping on the living room couch, or under the kotatsu, or anywhere else he could. His parents asked him to please sleep in his room like a normal child, then pleaded, then yelled—but eventually they gave up, shrugging that it was his back to ruin. Time passed, the origin of his strange sleeping preferences faded into more distant memory, and as far as the rest of the family was concerned it was just one of his personal quirks. As long as he got up on time for school, who really cared?
Still, when they sold the house several years later and moved into an apartment instead, Akito was relieved.
“Night terrors,” KK repeated, in the doubtful tone of someone who was trying and failing not to judge another man’s parenting choices—or general level of intelligence. “Your father saw his seven year old son have a screaming mental breakdown out of nowhere and brushed it off with one little chat about night terrors.”
Maybe KK would have tried hiding his derision harder if he knew he was speaking ill of the dead, but Akito had left out the fact that they’d sold the house because they couldn’t afford it after the accident that killed his father, and he was too tired to take offense. At some point during the story he’d hunched over, forearms braced on his thighs, and he was feeling the discomfort of it now. He unfurled his spine and heard a crack. “There was a horror movie that came out around that time about a kuchisake onna. He figured I’d seen a commercial for it on TV and gotten worked up about it. It wasn't a crazy leap.”
“The Shiraishi flick, yeah? Never saw it. Heard the reviews were mixed. But you didn’t actually see any commercial, did you?”
“I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t. I don’t remember everything that happened when I was seven.”
He didn’t remember everything that happened last week, to be honest, but he’d been living off of stolen catnaps and convenience store food for days now. To say he was not at peak mental performance at the moment was an understatement so severe it bordered on embarrassing.
KK wasn’t deterred. “Except you remember that night. In detail. When kids who have night terrors generally don’t remember—not what scared them, not running around in a panic, not their parents comforting them, nothing—because they’re still functionally asleep when it happens. And it sounds like you were wide fucking awake.” His voice had shifted into something more clinical, a diagnostician as much as a detective.
Akito…hadn’t known that. His father hadn’t said anything about that. He wondered if his father had been honestly mistaken, misinformed—or if he’d known very well that what Akito had experienced didn’t fit so neatly under the term. Maybe he’d seen his son’s fear and gone for the convenient half-truth, something Akito could use to make it explainable and small and easily ignored. To help him slam the door on whatever portion of his soul had called that thing to the Izuki residence in the night—Affinity, as KK called it—and let it wither from disuse, like a plant left untended in a perpetually dark room.
“Still, though," KK said. "Hell of a thing to happen to a seven-year-old.”
“Yeah, well.” He looked down at his hands. “I’m sure you’ve heard worse.”
“Comes with the territory. Hey, if you want, I’ll deal with all the kuchisake from here on out. Just say the word.”
In spite of everything awful thing he’d just recounted, every vulnerability he’d laid out on the table for a man he barely knew to peruse, Akito was smiling. “I dunno. Killing them with fire might be cathartic. I’ll let you know if I have any jars that need opening, though.”
“I am an excellent jar opener,” KK said, far too seriously.
“Deal. In exchange I’ll squash the jorogumo for you.”
“I'll hold you to that. You're gonna need a really big shoe.”
He couldn’t get the dumbass smile off his face the rest of the night, but if KK could tell, he didn’t say anything.