And the second on the list wasn’t an option, not at all.
How to put a dark power to sleep, one that whispered in your ear that you were a demon, one that gave you nightmares and brought your drawings to life with teeth and claws?
“Maybe a really good lullaby?” I suggested. Tomo rolled his eyes. We were slouching on either side of his living room couch, our backs curved against the arms of the sofa and our knees flopped against each other’s in the middle. Tomo mashed the buttons on the TV remote, cycling through the channels over and over.
“Or a bedtime story?” Tomo teased back. “Goodnight Moon?”
I shoved his knee with mine, gently, but he still winced. The bruises from his fight with Jun hadn’t faded yet. They hadn’t even had time to fade.
Only a few days ago we’d learned the truth, that the kami Amaterasu, goddess of the sun, wasn’t the only one with descendants. The power to make ink drawings come alive, the nightmares that plagued Tomo and Jun and the others who could control the ink...that power could come from other kami. Tomo had sketched Amaterasu in his notebook, and she had revealed the truth to us—that Jun was descended from Susanou, the kami of storms, snakes and the World of Darkness.Yomi, or, you know, Hell. Susanou was Amaterasu’s brother and most dangerous rival.
And worse, Tomo was descended from not one but two kami—Amaterasu, the imperial ancestor, and Tsukiyomi, the god of the moon, her scorned and vengeful lover. The two bloodlines fought within him, which meant that Tomo often lost control of his drawings and himself, his eyes growing large and vacant and deadly. It had become so bad that he couldn’t enter shrines anymore; going through the Shinto gateways knocked him out cold. Jun had called him a land mine; he could go off and cause mass destruction at any time. And then Jun had decided it was up to him to destroy Tomo, right then and there. It had been like both of them had lost consciousness, taken over by the ancient hatred between Susanou and Tsukiyomi. Ikeda and I had barely pulled them apart in time before they killed each other.
“Funny,” I said. “But I don’t think Goodnight Moon will cut it.”
I wished I could go back to the time I’d arrived in Japan, when the cherry blossoms had rained through the sky and Tomo had just been an annoying senior classmate, when neither of us had awakened the sort of forces we now faced.
I sketched a cherry blossom in the corner of my paper, thinking back on that spring. I wasn’t the artist that Tomo was, but I still drew a mean stick figure and flower bud.
Tomo lifted the remote to flip the channel again. The tiny gust of air spun the sketched cherry blossom in circles. I stared at it, my eyes wide.
When Tomo’s drawing of Amaterasu had come to life, so had the ink trapped in me. When Mom was pregnant with me, she’d been accidentally poisoned by a kami drawing. We’d both barely survived, and now the ink ran in my veins—Jun called me a manufactured Kami, a man-made descendant. I was nowhere near as powerful as Tomo and Jun were, but the ink in me called out to the ink in them. And now it was going totally haywire. I pressed my pencil against the edge of the sketched petal, stopping the blossom from twirling.
“Yurusenai yo,” Tomo said in a high, clipped voice, and at first I thought he was talking to me. I won’t forgive you. But then he made a peace sign with his free hand, holding it up to the side of his face. God he looked adorable. I wanted to reach over and ruffle his hair.
I glanced at the TV, anime sparkles and canned music blaring at me from the screen. A group of magical schoolgirls in a rainbow of skirt colors pulled elaborate poses, peace signs cupped to their faces like Tomo. They blasted a bunch of monsters with their special powers as they backflipped and whirled around the Tokyo Skytree tower in ridiculously high heels.
I rolled my eyes. “How can they fight in those? Where are all the broken ankles?”
The leader of the girls got a close-up now, tilting her head to the side as she posed. “Yurusenai yo!” she squeaked, and Tomo looked smugly pleased.
The scene cut to one of the girls smacking a monster in the face with an ofuda, a paper scroll that banished evil. Wait. “Hey, would that work in real life?”
“I don’t look so great in high heels and a miniskirt,” Tomo said. “Unless you’re into that kind of thing.”
I smacked his knee again. “I mean the ofuda. That’s a Shinto scroll, right? Couldn’t it stop a kami?”
He frowned. “I doubt it. They usually invoke the help of a kami, not banish one. They’re more for expelling demons. Like a larger version of the omamori I gave you.”
I pulled out my phone, looking at the soft yellow pouch Tomo had risked entering a shrine for, just to give to me. The charm read “Yaku-yoke Mamoru,” embroidered on the fabric in soft pink kanji. Protection from Evil.
The last time Tomo had entered a shrine with me, he’d collapsed in a pool of ink, attacked by some kind of kami alarm system as a threat to the sacred place. I am evil, he’d told me. I’m the demon lurking in the shadows. But even now, knowing he was descended from Tsukiyomi, I couldn’t believe it. He was descended from Amaterasu, too, right? And wasn’t she supposed to be the protector of Japan? The little bell on the charm jingled as I put the phone back in my pocket.
“If you remember, the omamori didn’t work so well,” Tomo said.
I chewed on my bottom lip and said nothing. It had worked. The omamori had fallen out of my pocket and clinked against the floor when Jun had kissed me at his school. It had broken me out of the moment; it had protected me from the awful mistake I’d made. I still wasn’t sure if Jun had actually liked me, or had just been using me to get to Tomo. It didn’t matter—I’d screwed up big-time, and almost lost Tomo. Heat prickled down my neck as I shook the guilt away.
“We’ve got to have more options than leave Japan or die,” I said, trying to get back on track.
Tomo closed his eyes. “What if I draw Tsukiyomi, and then rip the sketch in half?”
I stared at him; he’d lost his mind. “You’re joking, right? Ripping the drawing of Amaterasu nearly killed me. Ripping Tsukiyomi in half might kill you.”
He frowned. “There’s never been a constant way to stop the kami. Sometimes it overpowers me and I collapse, and sometimes I can get startled out of its control, but... I can’t see a connection. Maybe I just need to live under a torii and stay unconscious.”
I groaned, scribbling out my list. We weren’t getting anywhere this way.
Tomo rested the remote on the side table and sat up, resting his hands on my shoulders. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll think of something.” He pulled me gently toward him, turning me so my back was against his chest. I leaned into the warmth of him, the scent of miso and vanilla around me, his heart thudding gently against the back of my shoulder.
The paper list slipped off my lap, floating toward the floor and slipping halfway under the couch. The cherry blossom in the corner spun like a pinwheel, and Tomo went rigid beneath me, his breath catching in his throat. “Is that—is it moving?”
I sat up as he grabbed the paper. He frowned as the flower shriveled before us, crumpling into a scribbled ugliness in the corner. “Katie,” he said, his voice deep and troubled.
“I know,” I said. “Ever since