“What are those?” I asked.
“Just stupid drawings.”
I frowned; why did his voice sound off? “Let me see.”
“They’re all scratched out anyway,” he said. “I’ll draw something new. I think my sketches will be more powerful after the hiatus.”
“Should I stand back?”
“I’ll just draw something contained. Something harmless,” he said. He reached for the pen clipped over the notebooks pages, pulling the cap off with a snick.
“Harmless?” Everything he drew managed to be harmful. Flowers had thorns; glass wind chimes had glass edges you could cut yourself on. But he was already drawing.
It was harder to see the dark lines as they swept across the page in the dark. But then suddenly I could see a little better, and everything was brighter.
Specks of silver light blinked into existence around me as Tomohiro drew. They sparked everywhere in the darkness, like disconnected fireworks, hovering in the air, blinking in and out of view. Some of them burst into being like tiny explosions.
“Fireflies,” I said, standing. There was a cloud of them, woven through the tree branches like strings of lights, flashing in strange rhythms as they lit up and died out. The whole tree was aglow, Tomohiro’s page flickering with their light as he drew more. “Won’t the people in the hotel see?” I breathed.
Tomohiro smiled. “Tourist season is over,” he said. “Hotel’s closed.”
So that’s why it was so quiet here.
I stepped into the clearing, the fireflies thick in the air around me. If I reached out my arms, I wondered if I could touch them. They fluttered, blinking in and out, always in a new spot when they lit again.
“Beautiful,” I said, “but hardly contained.”
He laughed. “They can’t do much damage,” he said. “But they’re for light. I figured a candle might burn down the whole mountain. At least from my notebook.”
He was right. Drawing fire was way too risky. But fireflies—it was magic, the only way to describe it. Their wings rasped like paper as they hummed in the air around me, and their lights were silver instead of gold or green, but walking through them with my arms outstretched felt like walking through a fairyland. They cast moving shadows everywhere, so that the whole world seemed to light like a carnival.
Tomo gasped, and I turned quickly. “Are you okay?”
“Katie,” he said, reaching his arm out for me. I moved toward him, taking his hand as I knelt in the grass.
“What is it?” I said. I looked at his face as it flickered in and out of the shadowy light. Beads of sweat rolled down from his forehead; his eyes looked strange.
“The voices,” he breathed. He shuddered now, and I tilted my head to listen. I could hear the wind, swelling with sound. “I can’t.”
I squeezed his hand. “You can, Tomo. It’s only because the ink is flowing again. You’re in control, okay?” His eyes held mine as he gasped. The fireflies swarmed into a tornado around us, spinning with an unnatural frenzy. “Do you need to cross them out?”
He shook his head. “Just...just stay with me.” I nodded. A moment passed, our eyes locked as he searched mine for strength. “It’s like swimming in a current,” he gasped. “It’s...wonderful, but...too much.”
“You’re strong,” I said. “I’m here with you.”
He squeezed my hands tightly, and another moment went by. I tried not to think about the part where he’d said it was wonderful. I loved the beauty of his drawings, too, but it was scary to think he took any pleasure in losing control. He must not have meant it that way, I decided. His grip loosened, and he stopped shaking. The fireflies stopped swarming, spreading across the clearing again as if they were real.
“Better?”
He nodded.
“Yatta,” I said, and he let out a short laugh.
“That’s hardly celebration-worthy,” he said.
“How do you feel?”
“Better...and I want to draw something else.” He let go of my hands and took the pen.
“Are you sure?”
“It feels right,” he said, and his pen scratched across the paper. But I worried...was it his own idea or the Kami’s?
Something lit up in the pool.
“What are you drawing now?”
“Go see,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his tired voice.
I stepped forward slowly, cautiously. What if he was drawing something that yanked me into the water? But the silver glow in the water was no bigger than my hand and almost as wide. The shape started circling in fluid patterns.
It was a papery white koi, his eyes jet-black, ink tendrils swirling on his fins. He glowed with an unnatural light, his fins flapping against his sides as he glided through the sleek, dark waters. His black and silver scales gleamed in the firefly light. Beside him, another area of the pond lit up, like a lightbulb gradually brightening, and then there were two koi, circling. Then a third, and soon the whole pond gleamed with fish, making their own firework patterns in the water.
I barely heard Tomohiro as he approached from behind me. His breath fell softly upon my neck as he wrapped his arms around me, peering over my shoulder to watch the koi.
“Dou?” Tomohiro said quietly, his voice at my ear. “What do you think?”
I turned in his arms to face him and saw him looking at me with his deep eyes. The fireflies clung to the spikes in his hair, casting moving light and darkness across his face. He looked like a prince; he looked like a demon. The glow and shadow flickered like candlelight, and I wasn’t sure which he belonged to.
But I knew I wanted him to belong to me.
I raised myself up on the balls of my feet, pressing my lips against his. His arms tightened around me, drawing me closer as he kissed me back. My head filled with sweetness. Every movement of his fingers, everywhere his skin grazed mine, felt like a spark.
The fireflies alighted on his arms, his legs, the waistband of his jeans. They flashed out of sync, like they were broken. They tangled in my hair, too, and on my clothes. I could feel them clinging, their papery wings fluttering against my skin.
Tomo and I were draped in stars, floating among a thousand iridescent wings.
A loud splash startled me out of the moment. We both hesitated, clutching each other as we turned to look.
The ghostly white koi thrashed in the water as if they were on dry land, desperate and frantic. They were all swimming in one area of the pond, as if they were attached to each other.
Crimson blood swirled through the water, thick and black in the moonlight.
I raised my hand to my mouth. “They’re killing each other.”
Tomohiro dashed to his notebook, grabbing the pen and flipping the pages. He scribbled over the fish, slicing lines of ink through their necks and fins. One by one, the paper fish floated belly-up in the water, until it was nothing but a graveyard of drifting koi lanterns.
They melted into pools of black, swirling around the inky blood as they disintegrated into nothing. The ink caught on the wind and lifted like dull gold, glimmering among the silver firefly light.
“Kuse-yo,” Tomo swore in a hiss behind me. “Can’t anything ever go right?”
That’s when I felt the first bite.
“Ouch,” I said, swiping at my neck. My fingers crumpled the firefly’s wings and he tumbled into the grass below, his light dim as he struggled to flicker.
Another bite. “Ow!” Tomohiro still didn’t look up. “What the hell?” I snapped, and then he looked.
“Doushita?” he asked. What’s wrong?
That’s when I realized, yet again, the language gap held me back, even from getting help. Ow and ouch wouldn’t cut it in Japanese—he had no idea what they meant.
“Itai!” I said, swiping at the fireflies on my leg. Tomo looked at me with panic in his eyes.
The fireflies began to gather again, a massive silvery cloud hanging above us. They swarmed like a plague, their lights flashing in unison. The throng buzzed toward me and I screamed, ducking to the ground.
“Katie!” His pen swiped through the drawings in his notebook.
There was a sound like an explosion, hundreds of tiny lives shattered at once.
The firefly stars rained down around me, falling like a firework in slow motion.
The sadness was overwhelming, watching the cloud of lights drop. I reached out my palm and caught the bodies in my hand. They felt lighter than air, empty. Nothing.
I felt faint as I watched them, as their lights blinked out one after another. I didn’t feel right at all.
The world spiraled and I heard Tomohiro shout. Things were moving sideways, like I was dreaming.
I was falling, the dark tree branches rising above me.
I heard the loud thump as Tomohiro caught me, as his arms hooked under my shoulders and grabbed me, lowering me softly under the huge bonsai.
“Katie,” he said, but his words echoed. Above me the stars blinked in and out, floating down.
“The stars are sharp,” I heard myself say. I could feel them cutting into my wrists.
Tomohiro swore and lifted the waistband of his shirt, shrugging it over his head and tucking it around me to cover my bare arms. Then he was gone, and I was left to stare upward at the raining fireflies. Above them, dark clouds rolled slowly toward Mount Fuji’s shadow.
The last of the lights blinked out, and the field was dark again. I breathed in and out slowly—something was wrong with me. I brushed the grass with my fingers, trying to hold on to concrete feelings, to pull myself back from wherever I was.
“Katie,” Tomohiro said, his warm hands smoothing my hair out of my face. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I feel weird.”
He reached out for a can of milk tea and pulled the tab back with a crack. He pressed against my back as I lifted my head a little. The sweetness of the cold drink trickled down my throat.
He put the can aside and leaned over me, trying to lift me onto his lap. His stomach was warm against my cheek, his upper body lean and muscled from kendo training. The moonlight danced along the multitude of scars down his right arm. I reached up and traced along the edges of them, some smooth, others jagged.
It was when my hand pressed against his upper arm that we both saw the blood trickling down my wrist.
The shock of seeing it brought me back from everything.
“What happened?” I said, blinking. I sat up, but dizziness ripped through my head and I leaned back into the warmth of Tomohiro’s skin.
“The fireflies bit you,” he said. “I’m sorry, Katie. Che, I screw up everything.”
“I’m bleeding,” I said, but already Tomo was rustling in his pocket for his handkerchief. The poor cartoon elephant, who’d been drenched in the ink fireworks at Abekawa Hanabi, now sopped up my blood as Tomo gently wiped at my wrists.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “The bites aren’t deeper than papercuts. They’ll sting, but they shouldn’t be serious. Maybe you’re allergic or something.”
He hesitated, his eyes wide.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said, wiping at my arm again.
I snatched the handkerchief from him.
“Katie,” he said, trying to pull it back.
My body froze.
I was bleeding ink.
Chapter 9
My heart raced. What was going on? I threw the handkerchief as far as I could. “I’m bleeding ink, Tomo. Why am I bleeding ink?” I looked at the bites on my arms, and each one had a tiny trickle of black spilling out of it.
“Katie, it’s okay, don’t worry. Has this ever happened before?”
“Of course not,” I said, my voice wavering. Tears blurred my vision. “What’s happening to me?”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s just stop the bleeding first, and then we’ll figure it out, okay?”
I was shaking. I’d seen ink trail down Tomo’s arms, but I’d never seen him bleed ink. Why the hell would I bleed ink? Why now?
And I couldn’t pretend anymore that I was normal. Jun’s theory was right. There was ink in me.
Tomo used his shirt to mop at each of the bites, pressing until they stopped. He was quiet while he dabbed at them, gentle and careful, deep in thought. The last two bites had actual blood on them instead of ink, which was little comfort, but still.
“Looks like they stopped,” he said.
“Has that ever happened to you?” I asked quietly. “Did you ever bleed ink?”
He shook his head. “Never.”
“Great,” I said. “Fantastic.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been such an asshole. Asking you to come with me while I dealt with a buildup of power. What did I think was going to happen? Stupid.”
“It’s too late for that kind of thinking, Tomo. And in case you didn’t notice, you’re not the only one with Kami abilities.”
“But how could you be a Kami? I don’t get it,” Tomo said.
I squeezed my eyes shut, my cheeks flushing with guilt. There had to be a way to tell him what Jun had told me, without letting him know I’d gone to him for help, right?
“Niichan—Yuki’s brother—he called me a manufactured Kami,” I lied. Better to say Niichan than Jun.
Tomohiro’s eyes widened. “A what?”
“I wasn’t born Kami,” I said. “Well, I was, but...by accident. My mom ingested the ink when she was pregnant, and somehow it got into my system. I asked Diane, and she confirmed it. I mean, that my mom had eaten something sketched and gotten really sick.”
“Just stupid drawings.”
I frowned; why did his voice sound off? “Let me see.”
“They’re all scratched out anyway,” he said. “I’ll draw something new. I think my sketches will be more powerful after the hiatus.”
“Should I stand back?”
“I’ll just draw something contained. Something harmless,” he said. He reached for the pen clipped over the notebooks pages, pulling the cap off with a snick.
“Harmless?” Everything he drew managed to be harmful. Flowers had thorns; glass wind chimes had glass edges you could cut yourself on. But he was already drawing.
It was harder to see the dark lines as they swept across the page in the dark. But then suddenly I could see a little better, and everything was brighter.
Specks of silver light blinked into existence around me as Tomohiro drew. They sparked everywhere in the darkness, like disconnected fireworks, hovering in the air, blinking in and out of view. Some of them burst into being like tiny explosions.
“Fireflies,” I said, standing. There was a cloud of them, woven through the tree branches like strings of lights, flashing in strange rhythms as they lit up and died out. The whole tree was aglow, Tomohiro’s page flickering with their light as he drew more. “Won’t the people in the hotel see?” I breathed.
Tomohiro smiled. “Tourist season is over,” he said. “Hotel’s closed.”
So that’s why it was so quiet here.
I stepped into the clearing, the fireflies thick in the air around me. If I reached out my arms, I wondered if I could touch them. They fluttered, blinking in and out, always in a new spot when they lit again.
“Beautiful,” I said, “but hardly contained.”
He laughed. “They can’t do much damage,” he said. “But they’re for light. I figured a candle might burn down the whole mountain. At least from my notebook.”
He was right. Drawing fire was way too risky. But fireflies—it was magic, the only way to describe it. Their wings rasped like paper as they hummed in the air around me, and their lights were silver instead of gold or green, but walking through them with my arms outstretched felt like walking through a fairyland. They cast moving shadows everywhere, so that the whole world seemed to light like a carnival.
Tomo gasped, and I turned quickly. “Are you okay?”
“Katie,” he said, reaching his arm out for me. I moved toward him, taking his hand as I knelt in the grass.
“What is it?” I said. I looked at his face as it flickered in and out of the shadowy light. Beads of sweat rolled down from his forehead; his eyes looked strange.
“The voices,” he breathed. He shuddered now, and I tilted my head to listen. I could hear the wind, swelling with sound. “I can’t.”
I squeezed his hand. “You can, Tomo. It’s only because the ink is flowing again. You’re in control, okay?” His eyes held mine as he gasped. The fireflies swarmed into a tornado around us, spinning with an unnatural frenzy. “Do you need to cross them out?”
He shook his head. “Just...just stay with me.” I nodded. A moment passed, our eyes locked as he searched mine for strength. “It’s like swimming in a current,” he gasped. “It’s...wonderful, but...too much.”
“You’re strong,” I said. “I’m here with you.”
He squeezed my hands tightly, and another moment went by. I tried not to think about the part where he’d said it was wonderful. I loved the beauty of his drawings, too, but it was scary to think he took any pleasure in losing control. He must not have meant it that way, I decided. His grip loosened, and he stopped shaking. The fireflies stopped swarming, spreading across the clearing again as if they were real.
“Better?”
He nodded.
“Yatta,” I said, and he let out a short laugh.
“That’s hardly celebration-worthy,” he said.
“How do you feel?”
“Better...and I want to draw something else.” He let go of my hands and took the pen.
“Are you sure?”
“It feels right,” he said, and his pen scratched across the paper. But I worried...was it his own idea or the Kami’s?
Something lit up in the pool.
“What are you drawing now?”
“Go see,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his tired voice.
I stepped forward slowly, cautiously. What if he was drawing something that yanked me into the water? But the silver glow in the water was no bigger than my hand and almost as wide. The shape started circling in fluid patterns.
It was a papery white koi, his eyes jet-black, ink tendrils swirling on his fins. He glowed with an unnatural light, his fins flapping against his sides as he glided through the sleek, dark waters. His black and silver scales gleamed in the firefly light. Beside him, another area of the pond lit up, like a lightbulb gradually brightening, and then there were two koi, circling. Then a third, and soon the whole pond gleamed with fish, making their own firework patterns in the water.
I barely heard Tomohiro as he approached from behind me. His breath fell softly upon my neck as he wrapped his arms around me, peering over my shoulder to watch the koi.
“Dou?” Tomohiro said quietly, his voice at my ear. “What do you think?”
I turned in his arms to face him and saw him looking at me with his deep eyes. The fireflies clung to the spikes in his hair, casting moving light and darkness across his face. He looked like a prince; he looked like a demon. The glow and shadow flickered like candlelight, and I wasn’t sure which he belonged to.
But I knew I wanted him to belong to me.
I raised myself up on the balls of my feet, pressing my lips against his. His arms tightened around me, drawing me closer as he kissed me back. My head filled with sweetness. Every movement of his fingers, everywhere his skin grazed mine, felt like a spark.
The fireflies alighted on his arms, his legs, the waistband of his jeans. They flashed out of sync, like they were broken. They tangled in my hair, too, and on my clothes. I could feel them clinging, their papery wings fluttering against my skin.
Tomo and I were draped in stars, floating among a thousand iridescent wings.
A loud splash startled me out of the moment. We both hesitated, clutching each other as we turned to look.
The ghostly white koi thrashed in the water as if they were on dry land, desperate and frantic. They were all swimming in one area of the pond, as if they were attached to each other.
Crimson blood swirled through the water, thick and black in the moonlight.
I raised my hand to my mouth. “They’re killing each other.”
Tomohiro dashed to his notebook, grabbing the pen and flipping the pages. He scribbled over the fish, slicing lines of ink through their necks and fins. One by one, the paper fish floated belly-up in the water, until it was nothing but a graveyard of drifting koi lanterns.
They melted into pools of black, swirling around the inky blood as they disintegrated into nothing. The ink caught on the wind and lifted like dull gold, glimmering among the silver firefly light.
“Kuse-yo,” Tomo swore in a hiss behind me. “Can’t anything ever go right?”
That’s when I felt the first bite.
“Ouch,” I said, swiping at my neck. My fingers crumpled the firefly’s wings and he tumbled into the grass below, his light dim as he struggled to flicker.
Another bite. “Ow!” Tomohiro still didn’t look up. “What the hell?” I snapped, and then he looked.
“Doushita?” he asked. What’s wrong?
That’s when I realized, yet again, the language gap held me back, even from getting help. Ow and ouch wouldn’t cut it in Japanese—he had no idea what they meant.
“Itai!” I said, swiping at the fireflies on my leg. Tomo looked at me with panic in his eyes.
The fireflies began to gather again, a massive silvery cloud hanging above us. They swarmed like a plague, their lights flashing in unison. The throng buzzed toward me and I screamed, ducking to the ground.
“Katie!” His pen swiped through the drawings in his notebook.
There was a sound like an explosion, hundreds of tiny lives shattered at once.
The firefly stars rained down around me, falling like a firework in slow motion.
The sadness was overwhelming, watching the cloud of lights drop. I reached out my palm and caught the bodies in my hand. They felt lighter than air, empty. Nothing.
I felt faint as I watched them, as their lights blinked out one after another. I didn’t feel right at all.
The world spiraled and I heard Tomohiro shout. Things were moving sideways, like I was dreaming.
I was falling, the dark tree branches rising above me.
I heard the loud thump as Tomohiro caught me, as his arms hooked under my shoulders and grabbed me, lowering me softly under the huge bonsai.
“Katie,” he said, but his words echoed. Above me the stars blinked in and out, floating down.
“The stars are sharp,” I heard myself say. I could feel them cutting into my wrists.
Tomohiro swore and lifted the waistband of his shirt, shrugging it over his head and tucking it around me to cover my bare arms. Then he was gone, and I was left to stare upward at the raining fireflies. Above them, dark clouds rolled slowly toward Mount Fuji’s shadow.
The last of the lights blinked out, and the field was dark again. I breathed in and out slowly—something was wrong with me. I brushed the grass with my fingers, trying to hold on to concrete feelings, to pull myself back from wherever I was.
“Katie,” Tomohiro said, his warm hands smoothing my hair out of my face. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I feel weird.”
He reached out for a can of milk tea and pulled the tab back with a crack. He pressed against my back as I lifted my head a little. The sweetness of the cold drink trickled down my throat.
He put the can aside and leaned over me, trying to lift me onto his lap. His stomach was warm against my cheek, his upper body lean and muscled from kendo training. The moonlight danced along the multitude of scars down his right arm. I reached up and traced along the edges of them, some smooth, others jagged.
It was when my hand pressed against his upper arm that we both saw the blood trickling down my wrist.
The shock of seeing it brought me back from everything.
“What happened?” I said, blinking. I sat up, but dizziness ripped through my head and I leaned back into the warmth of Tomohiro’s skin.
“The fireflies bit you,” he said. “I’m sorry, Katie. Che, I screw up everything.”
“I’m bleeding,” I said, but already Tomo was rustling in his pocket for his handkerchief. The poor cartoon elephant, who’d been drenched in the ink fireworks at Abekawa Hanabi, now sopped up my blood as Tomo gently wiped at my wrists.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “The bites aren’t deeper than papercuts. They’ll sting, but they shouldn’t be serious. Maybe you’re allergic or something.”
He hesitated, his eyes wide.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said, wiping at my arm again.
I snatched the handkerchief from him.
“Katie,” he said, trying to pull it back.
My body froze.
I was bleeding ink.
Chapter 9
My heart raced. What was going on? I threw the handkerchief as far as I could. “I’m bleeding ink, Tomo. Why am I bleeding ink?” I looked at the bites on my arms, and each one had a tiny trickle of black spilling out of it.
“Katie, it’s okay, don’t worry. Has this ever happened before?”
“Of course not,” I said, my voice wavering. Tears blurred my vision. “What’s happening to me?”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s just stop the bleeding first, and then we’ll figure it out, okay?”
I was shaking. I’d seen ink trail down Tomo’s arms, but I’d never seen him bleed ink. Why the hell would I bleed ink? Why now?
And I couldn’t pretend anymore that I was normal. Jun’s theory was right. There was ink in me.
Tomo used his shirt to mop at each of the bites, pressing until they stopped. He was quiet while he dabbed at them, gentle and careful, deep in thought. The last two bites had actual blood on them instead of ink, which was little comfort, but still.
“Looks like they stopped,” he said.
“Has that ever happened to you?” I asked quietly. “Did you ever bleed ink?”
He shook his head. “Never.”
“Great,” I said. “Fantastic.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been such an asshole. Asking you to come with me while I dealt with a buildup of power. What did I think was going to happen? Stupid.”
“It’s too late for that kind of thinking, Tomo. And in case you didn’t notice, you’re not the only one with Kami abilities.”
“But how could you be a Kami? I don’t get it,” Tomo said.
I squeezed my eyes shut, my cheeks flushing with guilt. There had to be a way to tell him what Jun had told me, without letting him know I’d gone to him for help, right?
“Niichan—Yuki’s brother—he called me a manufactured Kami,” I lied. Better to say Niichan than Jun.
Tomohiro’s eyes widened. “A what?”
“I wasn’t born Kami,” I said. “Well, I was, but...by accident. My mom ingested the ink when she was pregnant, and somehow it got into my system. I asked Diane, and she confirmed it. I mean, that my mom had eaten something sketched and gotten really sick.”
