Chapter 39

We plunge onward while the dogs yelp and bark behind the brambles. I wonder how long the illusion will hold. I’m panting hard, my lungs and legs burning. We dart down a ravine, and I skid and fall. The barking sounds distant now, so I sit for a second to catch my breath. Yukimi drops down next to me, clutching her wounded leg.

Blood seeps through her jeans and stains her hand.

“We need to hide,” I say. “Maybe as foxes—”

“No,” she says. “It’s too dangerous for you.”

“I can’t keep running.”

Yukimi exhales in a puff of white. She reaches into the pocket of her jacket and hands me a scrap of white fabric knotted around a small, hard object—a bone. One of Akira’s finger bones.

My mouth instantly turns sandstone dry. “Why are you—?”

“Shhh.” She takes a switchblade from her belt, rolls up her sleeve, and slides the blade along her arm. “Damn it, where did I put that?” Bleeding, she fumbles in her jacket pocket.

“We can do this later,” I say, my voice unsteady.

She shakes her head, then pulls out a tiny bottle and lets her blood drip inside. “You need this now.”

“But—”

Yukimi presses the bottle into my hands. “Don’t lose this.”

She’s leaving me. Again.

“No.” My voice cracks. “You can’t.”

“I have to.” She sighs. “And I have to tell you…”

That she killed Akira. But I already know.

Yukimi slips her hand behind my head and draws me closer, her breath hot in my ear. “My name is Kazahana.”

My heart stops beating for a moment.

And then she’s withdrawing from me, shedding her clothes and the last shreds of her humanity, disappearing into the shape of a fox. She comes to me, not limping so badly on four legs, and licks one of the tears from my face. Then she bounds into the forest.

Straight toward the inugami.

“Wait!” I say.

Yukimi runs as if she doesn’t hear me. I scramble after her, but she’s a red streak across the snow. I’m losing her.

“Okāsan!” I shout.

She doesn’t stop.

I run, stumble, climb to my feet again. My throat’s so tight it’s choking me. Between the trees ahead, I see Katashi and Ushio and the rest of the dogs swerve in their tracks. They circle around the fox, trap her, fling themselves on her and drive her down.

A root sends me sprawling. I strain to lift my head.

I can’t see her anymore. I can only see the dogs, and bloody snow.

I struggle to my feet and start limping forward. A black horse gallops from the trees. Gwen.

“They have Yukimi,” I say. “We have to help her.”

Gwen shakes her head, then tosses her mane and trots to me. She nudges me with her nose, away from the inugami and the blood. I try to sidestep, but she fixes me with a stare from her golden eyes, like a true pooka. Ride.

The fight slips from my muscles, and I climb onto her back, clinging to her with fistfuls of mane.

I look back. All I see is a little scrap of red on the snow.

~

On the last night of the year, I stand silently in a secret temple room while all of Tokyo celebrates Shōgatsu. I want to be out there with my grandparents and Gwen, listening for the temple bells, eating mochi and sipping tea together, but of course I can’t. Instead I stand here, wearing a coarse cotton robe, and watch as Shizuka grinds my father’s bone to dust. The silver embroidery on her smoke-gray kimono shimmers by the light of the candles. She purses her lips.

“Is it going to work?” I say.

Shizuka nods and pours the bone-dust into a bowl of polished granite on the table. She trickles my mother’s blood over the bone, then whispers a few words too old for me to understand.

“Your mother’s name?” she says.

When I close my eyes, I can still see the way Yukimi looked at me that one last time. I try to speak, but my mouth is too dry, and the word comes out as a puff of air. I try again.

“Kazahana.”

“A lovely name,” Shizuka says quietly. “Do you understand it?”

I shake my head.

“A winter wind bringing snow.” She tilts her head to one side. “Not that unlike the meaning of the name Yukimi.”

Snow beauty.

A tiny smile tugs at my mouth. So she did always share a shadow of her true name—but I never knew it until now.

“And your father’s name?”

My face goes blank again. “Akira Matsuzawa.”

Nothing special about that. But he was who he was. I can’t let myself think too much about it, not yet.

Shizuka lifts the bowl from the table. My heart starts pounding in my chest, and I force myself to take deep breaths. I already know what’s going to happen, but I don’t think I’m ready.

“Son of Kazahana and Akira, what is your name?”

I stare at the glinting flecks of granite in the bowl. I stare at the dark potion within, the essence of blood and bone blended with magic. I stare at Shizuka’s eyes, looking for hints, for help.

I swallow hard. “I’m not sure who I am.”

Shizuka remains motionless and silent.

“But I know who I want to be. I want to be someone who understands his past but isn’t defined by it. Someone who can make his own future.” I pause, thinking. “And is good at art.”

A corner of Shizuka’s mouth twitches. “Taste it first.”

I lift the bowl from her hands and tilt it at my lips. The potion fills my mouth with a bitterness richer and darker than any chocolate, paradoxically sparkling on my tongue like champagne.

I swallow. “It tastes like… lights in the darkness.”

“Then that is your name. Hotarugari.”

“Hotarugari?” The name resonates in my bones. “What does it mean?”

“Catching fireflies.”

Bells start to ring in the nearby Buddhist temples. It must be midnight. I know the bells will ring one hundred and eight times, once for each of the worldly sins. Afterward, these sins will be cleansed from the people of Tokyo, and the New Year can begin in peace.

I drain the rest of the potion, then open my eyes. “Hotarugari.”

~

Heat.

Sweet, perfume-drenched heat, the kind that soaks your skin and touches your bones. Eyes closed, I drink in the fragrance of infinite flowers. When I open my eyes, I still can’t believe I’m not dreaming, and I’m here.

Sunshine pours onto the lavender fields of Hokkaido, rows upon rows of purple that stretch to the startlingly blue horizon. In the distance, a stand of cheerfully spiky pines waves to the clouds wisping across the sky.

I’m home. But it’s not my home anymore.

A lovely sadness lingering in my chest, I look back at the watercolor I’m working on—a painting of the way the wind sends shimmering ripples through the flowers. The illusion I’ve crafted mimics this movement on paper. I’m a better artist with colored pencils, but watercolors seem to suit foxfire better.

“This,” I say, “is the Hokkaido I remember.”

Gwen leans over my shoulder to look. “I think it needs more squigglies.”

“Squiggly isn’t a technical artistic term,” I say dryly.

She rolls her eyes. “You know what I mean. Those things.” She points at the way the lavender sways in the illusory wind.

I sigh. “They aren’t easy.”

It’s the summer after my freshmen year at Humboldt State University. I’ve spent my first two semesters getting my artistic butt kicked by rich-kid faeries who’ve been crafting glamours since they were toddlers. But I’m learning.

I smile evilly at Gwen. “Or I could always paint you.”

“No!” She laughs. “No portraits.”

I study her face. Freckles pepper her cheeks—I like to think of them as Gwen’s happiness barometer, since she adores the sun. Hokkaido has plenty of sun in the summertime. We’re staying in the center of the island, close to where I ran as a kit-fox, and far away from Yukimi and Akira.

I swallow hard. I don’t know when that will ever stop hurting.

I pick up my paintbrush again, since art says what I can’t find words for. There’s a single pink lavender flower growing nearby that I want to paint in the foreground, but I’m not sure about the colors. From the corner of my eye, I see a flash of red on purple.

I blink. The sun must be getting to me.

“I’m going to go read,” Gwen says, “back on the infinitely more comfortable grass. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say, sounding absent-minded in a perfectly calculated way.

Gwen hikes away, a book under one arm, and I keep fiddling with my watercolors. I pretend not to notice how the vixen creeps from the lavender and stares at me.

It can’t be her… unless her death was no more than an illusion.

“Kazahana?” I whisper.

The vixen flicks her ears back, then trots to me as if she can’t help herself. I meet her eyes, and I know it’s her.

We don’t say anything; we don’t need to. A giddy feeling spirals through me. She tricked the yakuza and lived.

I keep my voice low, as if I might spook her. “It is you.”

Kazahana—Yukimi—Okāsan—touches her nose to the back of my hand, her whiskers tickling my skin, then bounds back into the field and disappears, like a drop of red in a pool of purple.

“Tavian!” Gwen calls. “Come here!”

My heart thuds harder and I feel a twinge of pain. It could be the yakuza and their dogs, back to finish the job. Taking a steadying breath, I look back and see Gwen standing on the crest of a hill. Her curls fly behind her in the wind, glinting in the sun.

“I found a gorgeous flower for you to paint,” she says.

I smile.