Jim pulled a knife from his sheath. It was his giant G.I. Joe knife, dark gray with a wicked curved tip and a serrated edge near the handle.
Michelle turned and looked at us. Her eyes were empty. Dead eyes, like two dark holes in her head. And I had really liked her, too.
Behind Michelle, another body lay in the corner on its side, long dark hair fanned out on the filthy floor like a black veil. Roger, a werelynx. Dead as well.
Michelle’s left arm jerked up and forward, resting on the floor. Her right followed, like she was a puppet on a string.
“What do you want?” Jim’s voice was a low snarl. That’s why Jim was in charge. I didn’t have to explain that something was controlling the dead. He figured it out all on his own and wasted no time on being weirded out by it.
Michelle’s body turned, flipping her into a crouch.
Many things controlled the dead. I had to figure out who pulled the strings, before I could try a curse. Think, Dali, think.
“Any advice?” Jim asked, his voice casual.
“Keep her busy, so I can figure this out.”
Michelle’s mouth gaped open, showing dark nasty teeth.
“And try not to get bit.”
Michelle launched from her crouch, hands outstretched, fingers like claws. Jim lunged at her. He grabbed her arm, the knife sliced in a furious arch, and Jim hurled Michelle across the room into the wall.
I clenched my calligraphy brush. This thing could’ve sent Michelle at us the moment we stepped through the door. But no, it taunted us from the window with the light. It made the ceiling above us creak on purpose.
Michelle rebounded from the wall, flipping in midair, kicking at Jim. He sidestepped, but she was fast. Her nails raked his chest with unnatural strength, ripping through clothes. Blood swelled through the tears. Jim grabbed her arm and twisted, his knife biting deep into Michelle’s shoulder. Something crunched and Michelle’s arm came away in Jim’s hand—he’d cleaved the ball joint from the socket. Like cutting a wing from a chicken.
Michelle spun around. No blood spilled from the cut. She bared her teeth and lunged at Jim again, swiping at him with her remaining hand. Michelle was a jackal. They didn’t claw, they bit.
He’d have to mince her into tiny pieces before she’d stop.
Something chuckled in the corner, where the magic knotted into a dark bramble. It was laughing at us. Playing a game, a cruel game.
Michelle clawed at Jim.
Just like a cat.
I began drawing my kanji. “Kill her now, please.”
Jim jerked Michelle down. He cut in a vicious swipe and her head plunked down on the floor.
A dark shape coalesced from the knotted magic in a blink and leapt over Roger’s corpse. I hurled my curse at it. The rigid white strip hit it between the eyes. Magic pulsed and I saw yellow cat eyes glowing like two moons at me from a round fur face.
Roger rammed into Jim.
The cat beast leapt in a blur, straight at me. The huge body knocked me off my feet. I flew and the back of my head bounced off the boards.
The cat clamped me down, its weight crushing my chest. A dark feline mouth gaped at me, exhaling fetid breath into my face. Pain punctured my shoulders like red-hot needles. I tried to snarl, but I had no air and only a small squeak came out.
The black mouth bit down. The kanji on the white piece of paper flared with green.
The paper burst into a dozen strips. They shot outward, jerking the cat off of me.
I blinked, trying to suck in a breath. Jim leaned over and thrust his hand down to me. I grabbed it and he pulled me up. Roger’s corpse, broken and twisted, crumpled on the floor. Above it, a long feline body hung about two feet off the ground, wrapped in long strips of paper. It was six feet long and shaggy with orange and white fur, a house cat that had somehow grown to a leopard size. The strips adhered to the walls and ceiling, clutching the cat like the wrappings of a mummy.
The beast wasn’t moving. Two paper strips had caught its throat in a makeshift noose. Its head hung limp, mouth open, a long tongue sticking out of the corner of its mouth. The yellow eyes, once glowing with bloodlust, were dull now.
I swallowed. My mouth tasted bitter. The cat monster was dead. My hands trembled from adrenaline. I had screwed up.
“WHAT THE HELL is that?” Jim asked. His voice was calm. His hands didn’t shake. Cool as ice. Why couldn’t I be more like that?
I sniffed, trying to hide the trembling. “Two tails or one?”
Jim took a step to the cat and lifted two long furry tails.
“It’s a nekomata,” I said. “A yōkai.”
Jim gave me a blank look.
“The yōkai are Japanese demons.” I rubbed my face. “Legends say that if a cat’s tail isn’t cropped and some other conditions are met, it has a chance to become a bakeneko, a demon ghost cat. Bakeneko cats grow to a huge size and get supernatural powers. Sometimes their tails fork and they become nekomata, demon monster cats. They have the power to control the dead, take on human form, and can do some nasty things.”
“Do they have the power to put people to sleep?”
I knew he’d get around to that sooner or later. “No. It’s possible that the woman you saw was a nekomata in disguise, but it’s not likely. She had you and she let you go. The nekomata is a cat, Jim. It’s cruel and mean, and it likes to play games, but you know yourself, the prey never gets away. This”—I waved my arms around—“is complicated. Too complicated for a demon cat. They mostly set fires, steal corpses, and walk around in human clothes, pretending to be your elderly mother so they can get free grub. There is magic here, really bad magic. It kind of scares me. The nekomata is dead, but the magic is still here. Something else is going on. This isn’t over.”
Jim tapped one of the paper strips with his knife. The strip didn’t give. “And this?”
“This is the curse of twenty-seven binding scrolls.”
Jim slashed at the paper strip. The paper held. Jim scowled. “How the hell . . .”
Kate, one of my friends, always said that the best defense is a good offense. “Before you say anything, yes, I know that the curse didn’t function as expected and I know that it would’ve been better to have the nekomata restrained so we could question it, and I was trying to do that, but it’s not like it’s an exact science, and how was I supposed to know that the binding scrolls would choke the stupid demon to death? So you don’t have to tell me—I know! You try guessing some weird creature’s identity and writing calligraphy while it’s trying to bite your nose off and then don’t come crying to me.”
And that didn’t make even a tiny bit of sense. I was an exceptionally smart woman. Why did Jim always reduce me to some sort of ditzy bimbo idiot?
“I was going to say, how the hell did you pull that off,” Jim said. “You made paper with the tensile strength of steel out of nothing. The physics of this makes my brain hurt.”
“Oh.”
“And I would’ve said it and some other nice things, except that you jumped in my face and started sputtering and waving your tiny fists around.”
“Tiny fists?”
“That’s the root of your problem right there. You always rush into things looking for a fight. You’re like one of those First Responder magic cops: Ride in, kill everything, and then sort bodies into two piles: criminals and civilians.”
My face turned hot. My body was pumping out all sorts of angry, upset hormones. He was chewing me out like I was a child. I was this close to going furry, except it wouldn’t do me any good.
“If you take a tenth of a second to check if the fight you’re charging into isn’t there, it would save you a lot of grief.”
He didn’t get it and he would never get it. “Are you finished?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” I turned away from him and crouched by Roger’s body. Roger’s head hung in a weird angle, and both of his arms bent in places where no joints existed. Jim had broken him like a twig.
“What is it?”
You’re so special, why don’t you tell me, Mister Always Look Before You Leap. I dragged my finger against Roger’s skin. It came away with a powdery gray residue. I showed my finger to Jim. “I’m pretty sure normal corpses don’t do that.”
“I saw that,” Jim said. “Michelle was slippery, too.”
I rose. “We need to search the house.”
We combed the house. We found no sign of the two other shapeshifters: Neither Mina nor August had been in the house for at least thirty-six hours. Their scents were old. I swiped the log from the front office and we escaped.
Outside the cold night air swept along my skin, washing away the nasty magic. I headed straight for Pooki and opened the log on the hood. Four different types of handwriting filled the pages. The last entry was three days old. I flipped back a month and scanned the entries.
“Are you actually reading this or just flipping pages?”
“Jim? Shush. I need to concentrate.” Shift changes, notes on shapeshifters caught in the city for one reason or another crashing at the house, routine, routine, routine . . . Mina’s entries identified different types of herbal tea she drank during her shift. Roger documented the patrol routes of three neighborhood cats, complete with battles for territory and places where they chose to mark it.
I kept turning the pages, and when I finally saw it, I almost didn’t realize it. Thursday before last, August failed to come in for the shift change. The log showed him signing in fourteen hours later. His ps, gs, and ys showed longer vertical strokes than usual. I ran my fingers on the other side of the page and felt the outlines of the letters. August had pressed too hard on the paper. He was excited when he signed in, confident, angry, maybe determined. His reason for the failure to show up read “overslept,” which made no sense considering the amount of pressure he put on the page. There was something grim about the way he wrote, as if he’d etched each letter into the paper.
I tapped the page, thinking. A nekomata was a Japanese monster. August was half Japanese, half white by birth, but American culturally. He couldn’t read kanji, and his Japanese was terrible. Atlanta had a large Japanese population, with its own school and stores, a place where American customs didn’t apply. August visited his family there, but he never quite got the Us and Them mentality, and being a halfer, he was looked down on. A few months ago he told me that one of his cousins was gay. August had gone to pick up the thirteen-year-old kid at Japanese school to take him to a family gathering and he’d seen the boy sit on his friend’s lap after recess. I had to explain that it was a cultural thing that didn’t indicate anything about his cousin’s sexuality, but it just didn’t compute from his Southern guy point of view. He didn’t completely believe me either and told me that if anyone ever picked on his cousin, he’d break their legs.
Magic tended to stick to nationality and region. People generated magic, and their superstitions and beliefs channeled it. If enough people believed that a certain creature existed and, worse, took precautions against it, eventually the magic birthed it into being. If you had an area densely settled by Irish, you got banshees. If you had Vietnamese settlers, sooner or later ma doi, the hungry spirits, would be haunting the streets. And if you had a Japanese community, you would get yōkai, demonic creatures.
The residue on Roger’s skin really bothered me. Either the top layer of his skin had turned to dust, or he’d been liberally powdered with something. No creature I could think of could do that to a body.
Of the four people in the office, August would be the most likely to come into contact with a Japanese legend. We had to retrace his steps.
I flipped the pages. The entries were becoming shorter, more erratic. On Saturday some of them looked unfinished, as if the writer had simply stopped in the middle of a sentence. Sunday had no entries. There should’ve been some. On Monday, a single entry written in Michelle’s neat handwriting read, Can’t stay awake. Help. m.
Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.
“We need to go to August’s place. We need to figure out why he was out on Thursday.” I looked up.
Jim was asleep leaning against the car.
“Jim!”
No response. I grabbed him and shook his shoulder. “Wake up! Wake up!” He slid to the ground, still asleep. I slapped his face. He didn’t move.
I pulled Pooki’s door open, popped the trunk, jerked the extra gallon can of enchanted water out, and dumped it on his face.
The water poured. Come on, come on . . .
Jim coughed and shook himself.
I dropped the can and grabbed his shoulders. “Wake up!”
Dark eyes looked at me. “I’m awake.”
“Don’t fall asleep! Don’t fall asleep, you hear?”
He growled and pushed off the ground. “I’m okay.”
No, he wasn’t okay. We were in trouble. We were really, really in trouble. I paced back and forth. My heart was beating so fast it felt about to explode. Something was wrong with my Jim and if I didn’t fix it now, he would end up like Roger, a dry cadaver full of nasty magic.
“Calm down,” Jim said.
“I am calm! Get in the car.” Emergencies called for desperate measures.
He got in. I flopped into the driver’s seat and chanted the engine into life, watching him like a hawk. He stayed awake. I dropped the parking brake and gunned it out of the parking lot. “Roll the window down,” I yelled over the roar of the engine. “You need wind on your face.”
“Where are we going?” he roared back.
“To see my mother!”