A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) (27 page)

"No!" Kara shouted,
but they couldn't hear over the wind.

The witch shot them a single
look that paralyzed them both. Their masks had not helped them. They had looked
her in the eye and, like the victims of Medusa, paid the price. Seconds more
and she might freeze them solid, ice inside and out, but the ghosts grappled
with her again.

"Ume, please!" Sakura
said again.

Ume took her hand and together
they knelt in the snow by Kubo's head.

"What do we do?"
Hachiro asked, gripping Kara's hand tightly.

Kubo struggled to get up on one
elbow, wheezing. From inside his robe he unsheathed a small, thin knife and
handed it to Kara.

"You bleed."

Kara took a deep breath. The
others all stared at her. Hachiro and Ume looked horrified, but the others had
all been warned. Ren backed away from the old monk. The ritual to break the
curse did not involve him, and he seemed very relieved at that.

She tugged off her gloves. Placing
the small blade against her palm, she turned to look at Hachiro. Staring into
his eyes, she sliced her palm. As numb as her hands were, pain seared through
her and she hissed through her teeth but did not break her gaze as she gave the
knife to Hachiro.

He kept his eyes glued to hers
as he followed suit.

The moment the first drop of
Kara's blood hit the snow, Kubo began to sing. How he knew the precise moment,
she did not know, but he opened his mouth and began a chant that became a
keening, almost mournful song in some dialect she could not translate at all.

One by one they all took the
knife — Hachiro handed it to Miho, who gave it to Sakura, who in turn
passed it on to Ume — and one by one they cut, and bled, even Ume. Her
expression had become one of resignation, of guilt, and of sorrow. One by one
they each made a fist.

Yuki-Onna thrashed against the
ghosts. Kara could not help looking, and she saw that there were perhaps two
dozen of them, maybe even more. Most she did not know, but the familiar faces
were there — Jiro and Hana, Chouku and Daisuke, and poor Sora — and
they were fierce and terrible to behold, but she loved them all so much in that
moment.

Kubo's song grew louder and he
rose, gesturing to Mai and Ren, who rushed in to help the old man up to a
sitting position. He gestured to Kara, who put her bleeding fist forward, and
then to the others, nodding as he sang, and they opened their hands and
together they bled. A crimson stain spread on the snow, steam rising from it,
their blood merging.

The storm raged harder,
buffeting them. Ren went down on his knees but managed to keep Kubo sitting up.
Face and clothes coated in frost, the old monk glanced around at each of them
in turn, his eyes weary, body swaying in the wind.

"Now you must be together,"
he said, and somehow the wind brought his voice to Kara's ears instead of away.
"No matter what you feel for each other, in this . . . you must be
together. Repeat after me . . .

"I feel the wind as it
passes by, and I bend with it.

"I feel the rain as it runs
down my face, and I drink of it.

"I feel time rush by like a
river, and I flow with it.

"They touch me and are
gone.

"Shadows vanish at sunrise.

"All things move on, except
for those I hold in my heart.

"The mark of evil is washed
away in blood,

"And cleansed by the waters
of the river of time.

"The wind and the rain and
the river and the darkness touch me,

"But the seasons give way,
the snake sheds its skin, and I am made new.

"Dark eyes and dark hearts
turn from me.

"They have no power over
me.

"And I am made new."

In unison they repeated the
words after Kubo, their voices rising in a forceful wave somewhere between
chant and song. Wakana, Miss Aritomo, Ren, and Mr. Yamato looked on, but Kara
saw they were only half-paying attention to the ritual. In the midst of the
storm and the rage of Yuki-Onna, the ghosts tormenting her, holding the witch
back from finishing the job she'd begun of killing Kubo, they were terrified
and freezing. They warmed each other, comforted each other, and stared, perhaps
each praying his or her own private prayers.

Halfway through the chant, Kara
looked up and saw something beautiful and unsettling. Sakura had become two
people. She was there, across from Kara, open palm bleeding into the snow in
front of Kubo, but beside and within her, a part of her and yet sliding away,
was the ghost of a girl who seemed to be an older, sadder version of Sakura. The
ghost had longer hair, thinner features, and eyes dark with a terrible wisdom,
but as Kara watched, the spirit — it could only have been Akane Murakami —
looked at Sakura with such love that Kara nearly wept with the heart-aching
beauty of it.

Kubo looked up when the chant
had finished. "It is done," he said.

As if in reply, the storm roared
and Yuki-Onna screamed with such ferocity that they all looked over at her. The
winter witch tore away from the ghosts, leaving parts of herself behind. Her
beauty had fled and all that remained was her hunger for death, the cruelest
part of winter. She whipped toward them over the snow. They all scattered,
forgetting for a moment about Kubo, before Hachiro and Ren rushed in to try to
drag him away.

Yuki-Onna lifted Ren with a
whirling funnel of snow and raging wind and hurled him into the trees. Kara
heard something snap and hoped it was branches. She reached out long fingers
toward Hachiro's face and Kara screamed, knowing she would freeze him solid and
he would be just as dead as Sora, just another of the winter's ghosts.

Kubo stood in the way. Yuki-Onna's
fingers touched him and frost covered his chest, but the old monk smiled sadly,
as though with pity.

"What's happening?"
Miho yelled beside Kara. "It's supposed to be over! The curse is gone."

Kara's heart clenched with a
fresh dose of fear. Miho was right. Kubo had told them that if the ritual worked,
the power that had summoned Yuki-Onna would be erased, and without that as an
anchor, the Woman in White could not remain in this world. But he had also said
no one had ever driven Yuki-Onna away before. Had he been wrong about the
ritual?

Yuki-Onna lifted Kubo off the
ground, pulled him to her, and sank those rows of shark teeth into his flesh
yet again. Ice crystals formed on his flesh as the witch drank his blood, and
Kara felt sure she was grinning all along. Kubo had been half-drained already,
his vitality gone, withered away, and now his blood ran down the white flesh of
Yuki-Onna's chin and throat.

"No!" Kara screamed,
and she ran at the witch.

Hachiro shouted her name,
reached out to stop her, but only managed to snag her jacket before she broke free
of him.

The ghosts darted about,
grasping at Yuki-Onna, but they were not working in concert, now, their efforts
in disarray, and the witch drove them off one and two at a time. If the spirits
did not work together, they would not be able to restrain her again.

As Kara rushed toward Yuki-Onna,
she saw Mr. Yamato doing the same from the other side. The old monk was the
only living connection between the principal and his dead father. Mr. Yamato
had deep respect and love for Kubo, and it showed on his face as he reached out
toward the Woman in White. Kara saw his hands take up fistfuls of the material
of Yuki-Onna's kimono and for a second it looked like he might get a grip on
her, but then the fabric turned to snow.

Kara tried to grab the witch but
her hands, too, passed right through, plunging instead into icy snow and air so
cold that she screamed in pain. But when she tried to pull her hands away, she
could not. They were freezing in place, inside Yuki-Onna.

The witch tossed Kubo away, the
old monk little more than skin and bones where he landed in the snow. Then
Yuki-Onna grabbed Mr. Yamato by the hair and turned to stare down at Kara, the
witch's black, bottomless eyes locked on hers.

"The monk's power is gone,"
the Woman in White said with a bloodstained grin. "I can see you now."

The ghosts tore at Yuki-Onna's
face and hair and kimono. They existed in this world and the next, like
Yuki-Onna, and so they could touch her. But Kara could not. Hachiro and Miho
were behind her now, trying to pull her away. Miss Aritomo and Ren were doing
the same with Mr. Yamato. Ume knelt in the snow by Kubo's still, unmoving body
and wept, while Mai and Wakana screamed to the spirits of their dead loved ones
to do something.

Then, Kara could move her hands.
She could barely feel them, but she could move them.

"The storm is dying!"
Miho shouted.

And it was. The wind's howl
began to quiet. The snow lightened. Hachiro and Miho pulled hard and Kara's
hands came free, the three of them tumbling to the ground together. Her hands
and forearms were red and raw and bloody, and she couldn't feel them, but she
could move her fingers.

The ritual had worked. Yuki-Onna's
power was fading.

The witch spun around, staring
in horror at the dying storm, the rest of them forgotten.

"No!"

She began to change, almost to
shrink down upon herself. Her fingers became delicate and beautiful again, and
her face followed suit. The wind danced around Yuki-Onna, her hair and her
kimono flowing with it. As her power diminished her elegance and quiet, surreal
loveliness returned.

Kara wondered if this was the
face of Yuki-Onna, or the face of Etsoku Reizei, the girl who had died on the
mountain during the winter's first snow and whose ashes had been used to help
create a body for Yuki-Onna in this world.

The ghosts left her alone, then,
standing by to watch as the winter witch glared at them all with eyes full of
hate.

"I still have the power
to kill you all,"
Yuki-Onna said, her voice like the wind, caressing
them, gusting around them.

"But you won't," Sakura
said, stepping forward.

They all stared at her, this
grim, hard-edged girl with her bandages, most of her face hidden by the jagged
veil of her hair. Kara did not know if the others could see it, but to her eyes
there were still two of Sakura, Akane's ghost blurred beside her, half joined
to her.

And then Sakura spoke in another
voice.

"We won't let you,"
said the ghost of Akane Murakami.

And she left her sister, the
intangible spirit only a silhouette against the snow as she rushed toward
Yuki-Onna. The Woman in White staggered backward in confusion but could do
nothing to stop it. Akane's ghost entered her, vanished inside of her.

Yuki-Onna cried out, but it
sounded more like anguish than pain. The witch doubled over, and for the first
time, Kara saw that she had left footprints in the snow.

Then she straightened up, and
her eyes had changed.

They were no longer eclipsed
with bottomless black. Instead, they were a soft, gentle brown, and they were
filled with a quiet melancholy.

Sakura started toward her. Miho
seemed about to try to stop her, but Kara held up a hand to forestall any
interference.

"Akane?" Sakura asked.

The snow woman shook her head. No.
This wasn't Akane. But it wasn't really Yuki-Onna, either. Not the creature who
had longed to drink life and to kill with the cruelty of winter's darkest days.
Perhaps it was that girl who'd died in the first storm of the season, or some
combination of the spirits inside Yuki-Onna now.

But Sakura smiled as though she
didn't believe it, like she was sure her sister was there. "I love you,"
she said.

The wind, weaker than it was but
still strong, gusted powerfully once more. Snow picked up from the ground,
swirling around Yuki-Onna, creating a churning maelstrom that lasted only
seconds before it subsided into nothing.

A final gust, and then the wind
became an ordinary breeze, and the snow tapered to flurries, and Yuki-Onna was
gone.

And so were the ghosts.

"Master Kubo!" Mr.
Yamato called, running over to drop to the snow beside Ume, who had been
tending to the Unsui.

Kara walked slowly toward them
with Hachiro at her side. He was rubbing her hands, trying to get the blood
flowing well, to get some warmth back into them. Mai and Wakana appeared from
the trees, helping a limping, bleeding Ren. Miss Aritomo and Miho approached as
well, until all but Sakura were gathered around the prone, unmoving body of the
old monk whose kindness and wisdom had saved them all.

The Unsui, it appeared, would
wander the clouds no longer.
Or, perhaps
, Kara thought,
he will
wander them forever, now
.

But then Mr. Yamato looked up.
"He's still breathing. We need an ambulance."

Miss Aritomo pulled out her
phone. Ume started snapping orders at Mai and Wakana, talking about her car
being not far, just a couple hundred yards down the mountain.

Kara felt afraid to hope, but
could not stop herself. It felt nice. Hope and love were the things that would
warm her. She turned to Hachiro, stood on her toes, and kissed him. When the
kiss was through their eyes met but neither of them spoke. There would be time
enough for words later. Instead, she lay her cheek against his chest and just
relished the feeling of him there, where he belonged.

"Look," Miho whispered
to her.

Kara glanced over and saw that
Sakura had not joined them. She stood gazing up the mountain toward the place
where Yuki-Onna had vanished.

"Give us a moment?"
she said to Hachiro.

He nodded. "Of course. Whatever
you need."

Kara and Miho went over to join
Sakura, standing on either side of her.

"Are you all right?"
Miho asked.

"I will be, I think,"
Sakura said. "But more importantly, I think Akane will be."