A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (23 page)

"Am I really dying?"
she asked, her voice so small inside her own head.

Akane smiled. "Not
today. I told you, I am here to look after you. You need strength. You need to
heal. You need
life
, and I can give you mine."

Sakura recoiled, shaking her
head. She didn't like the sound of that.

"No. What do you mean,
life? Akane, what do you —"

The carpet became a muddy
slope by the bay, the room vanished around them.

"You need to live,"
Akane said.

She reached out to touch her
sister's face, her hand passing right through flesh and bone, and . . .

Sakura woke, inhaling sharply,
pain clamped around her skull. Her eyes darted back and forth but she could
barely move. Machines beeped. She tried to speak but her voice failed her.

She closed her eyes tightly. Her
thoughts were blurred but she wondered if this was what it felt like to die.

And then she opened her eyes to
see the ghost of her sister, Akane, standing over her bed. Sakura felt
something break inside of her. For days, others had been seeing ghosts and all
she had wanted was to see a ghost of her own, to be in the presence of her
sister one last time.

"I miss you," Sakura
rasped weakly.

Akane did not speak, only shook
her head with
that
smile.

Though she had put aside so much
of her rage and grief already, Sakura had been holding on to a small, burning
shard of fury, hidden deep inside. Often she had hidden it even from herself,
because this anger was not directed at Akane's murderer, but at Akane herself,
for leaving. It made no sense and it was not fair, but Sakura had nursed the
pain and anger for a year and a half, ever since Akane's death.

Now she felt it leave her, and
fresh sadness filled her. She wanted to apologize somehow, but already her
strength was fading and the darkness swirled around the edges of her thoughts
again, unconsciousness about to claim her once more.

Whatever toughness Sakura had
tried to nurture in her outward image, whatever rebelliousness might be in her
nature, in that moment she felt her heart laid bare.

"I love you," she
said, tears welling in her eyes.

Akane reached down to touch her
face, bent to kiss her forehead, and even as Sakura's eyelids flickered and she
began to drift off, she thought she saw Akane begin to vanish. It seemed almost
as if the ghost were vanishing
into
Sakura, and as this thought occurred
to her, a surge of new vitality flooded through her. The pain in her head
abated dramatically, if not completely.

"Akane?" Sakura
whispered, touching a hand to her chest.

The ghost had disappeared, but
Sakura thought she knew where her sister had gone. She didn't know how, but she
knew why. Her sister loved her, and something had to be done about Yuki-Onna. She
could feel the thoughts in her mind, although they did not feel like her own.

Though the pain in her head had
abated, still she felt exhausted, perhaps from the painkillers, and sleep began
to claim her again.

As consciousness slipped away,
she felt sure that she smelled ripe plums.

Kara and Miss Aritomo had
originally planned to go all the way to the observatory on Takigami Mountain to
summon Yuki-Onna. They worried that if they did not go far enough up the
mountain that they would not truly be on it, and then the summoning might not
be successful, and then Kubo and the others would have no chance of finding
Hachiro and Ren. It was Kara's father who had prevailed upon them to
compromise. Halfway up from the parking lot to the observatory and no further .
. . about the point where Sora's ghost had first appeared. If they could draw
Yuki-Onna there, it would bring her even further from wherever she was keeping
the boys, but leave Kara and Miss Aritomo closer to the car.

Nobody bothered to point out
that the car would be poor protection from the Woman in White. She could freeze
the windows so hard that the glass would be brittle as eggshell. Or smash them
out with a gust of wind.

Better all around, Kara thought,
if Yuki-Onna did not attack them at all.

She knelt in the snow, rubbing
the smooth stone ward that Kubo had given her between her thumb and forefinger.
The leather thong around her neck smelled nice and she relished that for a
moment, then let it drop.

"This is the strangest
ritual I've ever heard of," she said aloud, shivering as an icy breeze
blew up, glancing around to make sure that was all it was.

From a small stand of pines off
to the right of the path, a polite voice replied.

"Master Kubo is the Unsui,"
Miss Aritomo said, poking her head out from between two thick pines. "He
would not mislead you."

Kara stared at her. Miss Aritomo
had once had a great love of Noh theater, until an attempt to perform a Noh
play at school — combined with the curse of Kyuketsuki — had led to
one of the most famous demons of the Noh stage coming to life and possessing
her body. Now, though she still advised the Noh Club at Monju-no-Chie school,
her passion for the art seemed diminished.

Today, however, she had worn a
mask from her vast collection. Masks were an integral part of Noh theatre,
vital to performance and storytelling. Kara knew she must have seen this
particular mask before — with a wisp of white beard, green horns, gold
and black eyes, and a bright red tongue, it had to be a demon or evil spirit —
but she could not place it or remember its name. Not that the name mattered
much. Kubo had said that the wards would be powerful, but that spirits saw the
essence of a person, not really their face, and that masks might help hide the
person's essence.

It wouldn't hide Yuuka, but it
might buy her a few minutes of confusion if the Yuki-Onna discovered her hiding
there. Kara had wanted to take the mask for herself and give Miss Aritomo the
ward, but no one would agree. She and Sakura and Miho were cursed; they —
and the boys in whom the Winter Witch had taken such an interest — were
the ones who needed the most protection. But it frightened Kara to have Miss
Aritomo there with only a mask to hide her.

She prayed that Kubo really did
know what he was talking about.

"What are you waiting for?"
Miss Aritomo said. "You need to begin."

Kara glanced at her cell phone,
saw the time, and knew that Yuuka was right. Kubo, Miho, and Mr. Yamato were on
the mountain, waiting for Yuki-Onna to leave the boys behind. It was time to
begin the summoning.

She took a deep breath and let
it out. Her every exhalation plumed into icy mist in the air. The sky hung low
and gray, thick with unfallen snow. But she knew that the storm could begin at
Yuki-Onna's merest whim.

Working quickly, Kara scooped
snow from the ground and fashioned a crude snow-woman. From her pocket she
withdrew two black stones Kubo had given her, which she pressed into the snow
for eyes, and then a small swatch of white silk, which she wrapped around her
snow-woman's neck as a kimono.

With a thumb-tack she pricked
her finger and she squeezed out a few drops of blood, which soaked into the
snow-woman instantly. Several more drops dribbled onto the snow around it, and
then Kara reached into the pack she had brought and withdrew the book. It had
come from Mr. Yamato's library, but there was nothing at all special about it. The
title translated as
Popular Japanese Folktales
and the contents were
just as boring and ordinary as described. This was no grimoire full of arcane
rites, but something taught to school children.

Kubo had said that it didn't
matter what the book was, as long as the story was about Yuki-Onna. There were
dozens of incarnations of the story, but this was apparently one of the most
common.

Kara held the book open to the
first page of the story in question and dripped three more tiny splashes of
blood onto the paper. Then she picked it up, and began to read aloud in
Japanese.

Telling Yuki-Onna's story.

Giving it life.

Kubo had told them all that in
the absence of real worship, storytelling was the modern world equivalent. The
blood, the snow-woman . . . they made the story an offering, and such things
were so few and far between in the twenty-first century that they would turn
the story — when told aloud — into a powerful summoning. Yuki-Onna
would not be able to stay way. Curiosity alone would have compelled her, even
if the power of the summoning did not.

And so Kara read:

"Two woodcutters were on
their way home one very cold evening when a great snowstorm overtook them. When
they arrived at the ferry, they found that the ferryman had gone away, leaving
his boat on the other side of the river. It was too cold to swim, so the
woodcutters took shelter in the ferryman's hut. They had nothing with which to
build a fire, and so could only cover themselves with their coats and lay down
to rest and wait out the storm, which they though would end soon.

"The old man quickly fell
asleep, but the boy lay awake a long time, listening to the howl of the wind
and the battering of snow upon the door and roof. At last, in spite of the
cold, he too fell asleep.

"He was awakened by a
scattering of snow upon his face —"

Kara paused, frowning deeply,
for the wind had picked up. She glanced about, heard some shuffling in the
pines — though Miss Aritomo stayed well hidden this time — and only
then did she notice the snowflakes that floated gently down to alight upon the
pages of the open book.

Swallowing her fear, she
continued to read.

Her hands shook as the
temperature dropped sharply. It was working. If she kept reading the sky would
churn and the storm would blast through and them Yuki-Onna would be there. Kara
took a deep breath and she thought of Hachiro, and of Ren, and of the people
who had already died because of the Woman in White. For several seconds she
closed her eyes, halting her reading, trying to muster up her courage, so
afraid that she would end up like Sora, frozen solid, dead in an instant.

"Why did you stop? Keep
reading,
" a voice like the sighing of the wind said, just beside her
ear.

It was not Miss Aritomo.

Miho leaned against a tree, its
knots and bare, broken branches jabbing her back. She had sat on the ground in
the snow for a while, but it had gotten too cold for her. The snow did not seem
to bother Kubo, however. The old monk sat cross-legged in the snow, barely
seeming to make an impression. His eyes were closed and his expression one of
utter serenity. His hands lay open and palm upward on his lap, and if it were
not for the straightness of his spine, Miho would have thought he had fallen
asleep.

Mr. Yamato stood a short
distance away. The principal had gone from anxious to jittery. He held an unlit
cigarette between his lips and from time to time he would take it out and hold
it between his fingers, just as he would if he were actually smoking it. When
they had first come up the mountain, the old monk had warned him not to light
it, and so instead the principal used it as a personal comfort, like a child
might hang on to a favorite stuffed animal.

They had driven north and come
up to the base of Takigami Mountain from that side. The climb was a bit steeper
and the forest there thicker, but it was not really that much more difficult
than the observatory side. What drew tourists to that spot was the convenience
of it, the well-kept observatory and the nearness to the rest of Miyazu City,
not to mention the view.

Kubo had guided them up through
the trees, sometimes following established paths and other times forging his
own trail through areas of the mountain that showed no sign of human intrusion.
The silence on the mountain made Miho uneasy. She felt as though spirits lurked
behind every tree, watching them pass as they journeyed further from
civilization and from safety. She told herself that was just in her head, that
she was just being paranoid, but she knew that a girl with a curse on her had a
good reason to think that everything was out to get her.

From time to time, Kubo would
stop, give a little croaking cough, and then spit into the air. At first Miho
had flinched in revulsion and worried about the old monk's health, but then she
noticed that each time the Unsui performed this tiny ritual, he would watch the
way the wind took his spittle, studying it as a tracker would study the prints
of an animal on the ground. Several times he had stopped for several minutes,
closed his eyes, and seemed to be listening to something Miho could not hear.

Not listening
, she had
decided after a while.
Feeling
.

Those weren't the only peculiar
things Kubo had done in their search for Yuki-Onna, and the place she kept Ren
and Hachiro. The monk had taken out a sheet of rice paper, torn it into tiny
shreds, and blown the pieces out of his palm in order to watch them swirl away
on the breeze and skitter across the snow. Some small writing had been scribbled
on the paper, but she had been unable to make out even a single character. Kubo
had chanted softly under his breath and then, each time, taken a swig of what
he said was plum wine from a small ceramic flask. He claimed that this was part
of his search for Yuki-Onna and, watching him, Miho actually believed him.

Perhaps twenty minutes after
they had started up the mountainside, Kubo had seemed to lock on target,
somehow. After that it was not a matter of searching, but of rushing. The old
monk moved with speed and agility, skipping over fallen trees and ducking
beneath jagged branches so swiftly that both Miho and the cigarette-craving Mr.
Yamato had difficulty keeping up, losing sight of Kubo several times as they
followed.