Prologue
“Ayato! Kazuma! Dinner!”
Ayato cringed. They were in the middle of a game of hide and seek. If he got up now, he’d give away his hiding place and Kazuma would win. Of course, if he didn’t get up now, Mama was going to be cross at them for letting their dinner get cold. Concede defeat to his twin sister, or suffer his mother’s wrath?
“Ayato, Kazuma, dinner, now!”
Concede defeat.
Ayato wiggled his fingers at the floorboards just above his nose. The metal studs in the floor holding the boards in place responded with a pleasant vibration to his magicks. They popped out one by one. Ayato kept them suspended in the air while he lifted the floorboard and crawled out.
“No, fair!” Kazuma stomped her feet on the stairs as she came down from searching the upstairs attic. “We said no magicks. You know I can’t use yosoki.” Her bottom lip swelled into a huge pout, framed by perfect black ringlet curls.
Ayato hurried to get the board put back into place, “Wait, no, Kazuma.”
“MAMA! Ayato cheated!”
Too late.
Kazuma took off for the kitchen at full speed, no doubt working on her tears to get Mama on her side. Ayato thrust his hand down, slamming the studs back into place and gave chase to his sister.
“I wasn’t cheating!” Ayato called after his twin. “That floorboard is loose! I just wanted to get out quickly!”
Ayato burst into the kitchen, greeted by the all too familiar sight of Kazuma with her head buried in their mother’s chest, her cloud-soft, pale blue hair cascading around her like a protective shield.
Mama's brow lifted in a disapproving tilt. “Ayato, how many times do I have to tell you not to use your magicks to cheat when you’re playing with your sister?”
“But I wasn’t cheating, honest.” Ayato hung back in the doorway, as his sister tilted her head to peer over her shoulder at him with watery blue eyes. “I didn’t use any magick to get into the hiding spot.”
“You’ve made your sister cry again,” she rubbed Kazuma’s back. “You’ll have no dessert tonight, now go get washed up. It’s time for dinner.”
Ayato opened his mouth to speak out about the injustice of it, but he knew it would only result in being sent to bed without his dinner, so he shut his lips tight and stomped to the sink to wash up.
He had wanted to say that it wasn’t his fault that Kazuma could only use fujuki divination magicks, and that he was certain it was his sister’s ability to see the future that allowed Kazuma to always know exactly when to come around to catch Ayato in the act. He couldn’t prove it, but that had to be how Kazuma did it.
Ayato was too lost in his own grievances to notice that they had a dinner guest until after he sat down on his floor cushion and found a stranger sitting across from him.
The stranger kept his arms folded across his chest and glared back at Ayato with his one good eye. Like all adults, he was a full kaji yosei, not a little half-blood okara like Ayato and Kazuma, who would remain half-human until they turned eighteen and their yokai sides took over. Like Mama and like all adult kaji, the man’s coarsely chopped hair was the palest of blues in tone. The eye not covered by a leather patch held the same icy hue and stared back at Ayato beneath a craggy brow.
Ayato swallowed hard, carefully drew his feet beneath him, and made his back straight.
“Ayato, Kazuma, this is Masanobu-kin.” Mama swept gracefully into the room in a flutter of lace and skirts to deliver the last of the dinner plates to the table. “He’s come here from the village of Maruya to speak to our kin. We’ll be lodging him for the night, so I expect you both to be on your best behavior.”
“Yes, Mama,” Ayato replied still staring at the hardness of this man.
It won him a smack on the back of the head, “It’s impolite to stare. And Kazuma, sit properly, what would your father think?”
Kazuma pulled her legs beneath her bottom, like Ayato had, and sat up straight on her floor cushion without a word.
Any invocation of their father had that effect. Papa had been killed by humans four years ago when Ayato and Kazuma were six. They had lived in Nakaba then, where the humans were, but Mama had moved the family back to the Ankoku, where all the other kaji lived after their father had been killed.
Kazuma hated her human side now and couldn’t wait for the transition to be rid of it, but Ayato still believed in his father’s idea that humans and yokai could learn to live together. After all, like all yosei, their mother was yokai, but until they transitioned, Ayato and Kazuma were human, like their father. And if yokai and human blood could harmonize within a single body, then why couldn’t humans and yokai live together peacefully?
“Are the rumors true?” Mama asked, keeping her gaze down on the bowl of rice in her hand.
Ayato paused in spooning soup into his bowl to glance over at the one-eyed man.
Masanobu-kin had lifted his own soup bowl to his lips moments before the question was asked. He drank the hot, salty broth in a single swig and set the empty bowl aside. “Yes, it’s true. Five villages in the western Ankoku have been decimated by plague, and it’s spreading rapidly east.”
“What’s a plague?” Kazuma asked as she reached for another grilled fish.
“It’s an illness that spreads very quickly from person to person,” Mama still stared at her bowl of rice, “and once you’ve gotten sick, there is very little hope of ever getting better again.”
“Will we have to leave the Ankoku?” Ayato inquired tentatively.
“We may have no choice.”
Ayato swallowed hard. Mama didn’t believe in sugarcoating the truth. She felt it was better if they knew the way of the world as it really was. Like when their father was killed by a mob, she sat them down and explained in no uncertain terms that in Nakaba, whenever something happened that was beyond the control of human hands, the humans placed the blame on yokai when it was something bad, and they gave praise to the Kishin gods when it was something good. That was why she had moved them to the Ankoku; to stay safe from the humans.
Kaji yosei were not powerful when compared to other yokai; just compared to humans. Grown-ups had a hollow back, and it was just that. A void. An empty space. It enabled them to find pockets of space where two worlds touched and slip inside, and this was their only true power. The Ankoku was one of those pockets; right there, right alongside Nakaba, yet invisible to most of the world’s inhabitants. Mama said that was why the kaji had chosen to live in the Ankoku. What was safer than disappearing to a world that very few others knew existed? Plus, there was no iron in the Ankoku, and kaji were severely vulnerable to iron. Just touching iron could sear their flesh. Ayato had done it once on a dare. He still had a scar on his left palm.
So, no iron, no humans, no yokai who were stronger than them; the Ankoku was a good deal for the kaji yosei. Ayato didn’t think he’d ever leave, even after he grew up and became a full yokai. And he certainly didn’t want to leave now because of a stupid plague.
Masanobu-kin dropped his wooden cup like his fingers had forgotten how to grasp it. Ayato jumped at the clatter as it struck a dinner plate. Crimson berry wine rushed across the table.
“Masanobu-kin?” Mama leaped into action, throwing a tea towel over the spill. “Is there something wrong with the wine?”
Kazuma offered her napkin to the mess.
Ayato grabbed the plate of grilled fish and the plate of stewed vegetables to rescue them from the blot on the table. The fish had been dusted in a spatter of red, but the vegetables seemed untouched.
“Masanobu-kin?” Mama paused in her rush to clean up the spill.
His one good eye had glazed over like he was looking at them but couldn’t see them. The familiar pale blue kaji color shattered into a million fragments, each reflecting a hue of its own, like the spider-webbing of a broken mirror.
Masanobu-kin struggled with jerking movements to climb to his feet and nearly fell on his face when his foot slipped on the floor cushion. He lurched through the kitchen towards the back door. Masanobu-kin fumbled with the latch, hands and arms no longer functioning as they should. He got it open and continued his stumbling gait into the backyard.
Kazuma and Mama ran after him. Ayato stayed rooted to the floor cushion, gripping the platter of grilled fish, until Mama screamed and it broke his spell.
Ayato was up and moving towards the door before he knew what he was doing.
Masanobu-kin had wrapped his arms tightly around one of the posts that held up the clothesline. He bit into the wood until his mouth bled. A pair of antlers sprouted slowly from over his temples, branching out larger as they pushed up from his skull. A second growth slid like a vine from the base of his spine.
Mama reached for Ayato and Kazuma, pulling them close, and tried to hide their eyes from what was happening. Ayato watched through her fingers as Masanobu-kin’s veins pulsed brightly with pale blue light as if someone had lit a fire beneath his skin. The tail vine reached the ground and took root, burrowing into the dirt beneath the grass.
The trees rustled as a breeze passed through. The antlers gave off a soft puff of dust. It swirled in the wind current and was carried away.
"The plague," Kazuma whispered.
Ayato glanced at his sister. She was peering through Mama's fingers, too, but her's were not eyes wide in fear. He swore a smile gripped the corners of her mouth.
In the days that followed, they learned that this was how the plague was spread. Infected kaji first experienced symptoms like human flu. When their symptoms seemed to get better, they began insisting that they needed to travel somewhere, anywhere. The compulsion became so strong, that they had to be restrained with magicks, because like Masanobu-kin, shortly after arriving at their destination, they rooted to the earth and died, releasing more of the plague into the air.
Ayato hadn’t traveled to Maruya himself, but he heard the stories of the men who returned from the village. There was no one left living. Like in Ayato’s village, they had attempted to keep the infected from traveling, but now the streets and forests of Maruya were littered with dead kaji, rooted to the ground. And once no one was left to restrain them, the infected had gone on their journeys to spread the plague to new villages.
They had found one survivor in another village, a boy two years younger than Ayato named Ryoma. Since he was only half-yokai, the adults thought that maybe his human side had saved him from the same fate as all the others in his village. It was not uncommon for there to be only one or two children per village. Kaji, like all other yosei, could only have a child if there was one human parent in the mix, but even then, most kaji were as barren as their hollows. However, they did make up for their low population with exceptionally long lifespans, even for yosei. Mama was over two hundred when she had Ayato and Kazuma, though she barely looked a day over twenty by human standards, and the pregnancy had occurred after trying for over a century to conceive, or so she told them. She told them she had needed to wait for her entama, her soul mate, to appear before being able to have children.
Within a week of the outbreak, someone had been to check each of the villages. Half were already abandoned. The others were infected. Several of the men sent out never returned, having gotten sick on the journey. They estimated that their population had been cut in half and would dwindle to zero. The akuma plague did not respond to healing magicks or any other known remedy. It would claim all their lives soon enough.
The remaining kin from the villages were all getting together today and were holding a meeting behind closed doors in Ayato’s village. Ayato, Kazuma, and Ryoma had become good friends by then. They told Mama they were going out to play then snuck down to the Lodge to see if they could spy on the meeting. They passed three or four kaji corpses, rooted to the ground along the way. One was still giving off the akuma spores from its antlers.
“What do you think the akuma is?” Kazuma asked, circling the former baker now wrapped in a death grip around the trunk of a young tree.
“Some kind of tiny yokai,” Ryoma suggested, tossing his head to flip his long dark hair out of his eyes. “So tiny that a whole bunch of them can get inside you and make you sick.”
“What was it like being sick?” Ayato found a nice-looking stick on the ground and picked it up.
“It was awful!” Ryoma chucked a stone at the ground. It bounced twice.
Ayato drew an X in the dirt at one bounce site. “What happened?”
“Yeah, tell us what happened?” Kazuma’s interest was piqued.
Neither twin had ever been sick before. It was one of the perks of being half-yokai.
“First my body got really, really hot, but it felt like I was freezing cold,” Ryoma shuttered slightly, round blue eyes trained on the ground. “I couldn’t stop shivering, no matter how many blankets were wrapped around me. And my head got all fuzzy like I couldn’t see straight, and I couldn’t move without feeling really dizzy like everything was just spinning around me. It was so weird. And I couldn’t eat without it coming out again.”
“You mean you threw up?” Kazuma delighted in the visceral idea of it all.
When they lived in the human world, they’d seen a human throw up once. The twins shared a glance and a grin. They hammed it up, pretending to gag and hurl.
“It won’t be funny when it happens to you,” Ryoma threw a stone at their feet. “It hurts and it feels like you can’t breathe.” He wiped his thin nose on the back of his hand and gave a heaving sniffle. "And you can't make it stop until there's nothing left inside you."
"Even guts?" Ayato cackled and dodged another rock.
“I’m not afraid of getting sick!” Kazuma declared. “Are you, Ayato?”
Ayato was laughing too hard from fake gagging and dodging Ryoma’s rocks to reply.
“Let’s get sick on purpose and get it over with.”
“What, Kazuma?” Ayato looked back in time to see Kazuma climb up the back of the dead baker. “What are you doing?”
Ayato dropped his lovely stick to run back to Kazuma. It was too late. She had taken two handfuls of the spores. Kazuma inhaled one handful herself and jumped down onto Ayato, shoving the other handful into Ayato’s face.
“There, now we can both be sick at the same time,” Kazuma grinned, scampering off her brother’s chest before Ayato could take a swing at her.
“What the Makai, Kazuma?” Ayato sneezed for the very first time in his life. He swept his hand at the dirt and used the wind to shoot a cloud of dust at his sister. “I don’t want to get sick!”
“We’re going to get sick eventually,” she reasoned. “Now we can just get it over with.”
“You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that when the fever starts,” Ryoma laughed.
Ayato's hands curled into fists.
Kazuma stuck her tongue out at him, "Race you there!" She took off down the road, bare feet kicking up dust in her wake.
"Hey, no fair!" Ryoma laughed and hurried after her.
Ayato sneezed again. "You're gonna pay for this, Kazuma!" He gritted his teeth and started running.
They didn’t make it to the Lodge in time to spy on the meeting, but they did get there in time to hear the verdict. The kin were going to round up all the okara children who had survived the akuma plague and send them out of the Ankoku to the human world. It was feared that once the children came of age and transitioned into yokai, they would lose their immunity to the plague. If the kaji race had any hope of survival, it was in sending the children away and barring them from ever returning to the contaminated world of the Ankoku.
Ten children had been found in the search of the villages, ranging from age sixteen to two. Most had been sick already like Ryoma, some were sick now, and three, Ayato and Kazuma included, hadn’t been sick yet. But that was only a matter of time thanks to a certain twin sister.
The ones that were sick now needed help getting around. The fever made it hard for them to move quickly and without needing something to lean on. Seeing how bad they had it made Ayato want to punch Kazuma on the arm. He didn’t though because then Kazuma would just run and tell Mama, and Ayato didn’t want to be in trouble on their last day in the Ankoku. Especially not after he caught Mama shivering like she was really cold, but flushed pink like she was really hot; trying to keep it from them.
Ayato didn’t say anything. It was too sad to think that Mama had gotten sick and was going to die. When he thought about trying to say something, it made him want to cry, so Ayato let her go on thinking that she had them fooled. Once all the children were assembled, they would be given provisions and sent to live in Nakaba, and he would never see Mama again. Why ruin the last few hours they had left together?
“You take good care of your sister,” Mama told Ayato as she packed a satchel full of crackers, nuts, and salmon jerky. “You’re the oldest. By a minute.” She managed to fit a jar of peach preserves in as well. “So you have to look after her, got that?”
“Yes, Mama.” But Ayato was only half listening. He was too busy memorizing the curve of her clavicle as she bent over the bag, the line that her jaw made when she held it too tightly, the way stray ice blue strands slipped over her shoulder, and the lilac scent of her perfume mingling with the bread baking in the stone fire oven.
“No crying.” Mama reached to swipe a tear from his cheek with fingers tipped in dark claws.
Ayato caught her hand between his, “But Mama.”
“No buts.” She attempted a smile but her lips only made a thin, flat line. “This is for your own good, so you can live. Have a future. We’ll see each other again one day. In the Makai.”
Ayato worried his thumb over the length of her black nail as he tried to bite his cheek and stop any more tears from forming. It didn’t work. He could feel them hot as fire in his eyes. He didn’t want to wait until the afterlife to see his mother again.
“Mama,” Kazuma wandered into the kitchen, “where’s the hunting knife Papa gave me?”
“Oh, yes,” Mama broke away from Ayato, eyes wide and straining against her own effort to control her tears. “You’ll both be needing your hunting knives.” She whirled towards the cupboard with the high shelf that the twins couldn’t reach, a flutter of skirts and grace. “Here they are.”
That was the end of the moment and the closest Ayato had ever seen Mama come to shedding tears since Papa died. She had cried a lot then, at first, but had simply stopped after his funeral and hadn’t cried once since. She feared that crying would make her seem weak. Ayato wanted to assure her that it didn’t, but he could never find the right words.
Later that afternoon, Ayato was loaded up with one satchel on each shoulder. Ryoma had to carry one of the two-year-olds who was sick and Kazuma had to carry the other. They were from different villages but simultaneously ill.
There was little fanfare. With the grownups all gathered together now, the tension had risen to a palpable level, but it was sprinkled with a dusting of hope that by sending the children away, they were securing the future. Ayato noted several flushed faces, like Mama’s. They had caught the akuma plague and wanted to send the children away before they were too sick or too dead to do it.
Kaji were already not very strong, but sick kaji were even weaker. It took six adults working together to open the passage to Nakaba, a task that usually took only two. They each licked the fingers of their right hands and swept them in a wide circle over the same space. A seventh was in line behind the sixth in case one more was needed, but the fifth swipe opened a small seam, and the sixth tore it open the rest of the way. Through the portal, Ayato could see a dark forest. It was nighttime in Nakaba. All around the portal, the warm afternoon sun shone brightly through the trees, but the light was swallowed by the rip in space and time.
Ayato’s stomach churned unpleasantly. He grimaced at the foreign sensation. Was this the sickness starting?
Mama gave them each one last hug and kiss goodbye. The hug went on for what felt like several minutes. Like each of them needed one last moment to imprint the other’s scent on their memory before letting go.
Once the children stepped through to the other side, the portal sealed shut behind them. They were alone. There was no way back now. That is, not until they transitioned and gained the ability to open the portal themselves. It might be suicide to go back, but at that moment, in the dark of the forest, Ayato wanted desperately to risk it one day.
