間違った感覚

Towards the end of the day, the four separate at the train station, Aoi leaving with Natsume to give Shuusei a present she bought for him. It was almost five o'clock by the time Pai and Shiori got to the road that led up to the shrine at the foot of the hill they lived on.

Shiori turned to Pai. "Hey, can you wait here for a second? I'm just going over to that shop to use the bathroom." She pointed at a ramen and udon shop a little ways down the right to their right.

Pai frowned. She didn't like the idea of them separating. "Can it wait? We are almost home?"

"Yeah, that's not going to work. I've been telling myself that for the last ten minutes, but I swear I'm going to burst. I am in pain, Pai-chan."

Pai paused, thinking. "Okay, I will come with you then."

Shiori rolled her eyes. "Come on, it's going to be fine." She held up the feather on her necklace. The slowly sinking sun glinted on the pale gold traces on the feather. "I have this with me, I'll be gone for five minutes tops, and there are hardly any Yori Chiisai around right now."

It was true. The only ones Pai could see were Yosei, merely little baubles of sparkling light as the sun sets, some silent Goryo wandering up and down the street and being driven through by passing cars when they crossed over onto the road, and a couple of Onmoraki flapping about.

Onmoraki, bird demons, created from the spirits of freshly dead corpses, looked as such and were incredibly weak. Their bodies were made from rotting flesh, feathers matted and dirty. Their faces looked like they had been bashed in with rocks, so much so that Pai couldn't tell if they once looked like pigeons or cranes. The only part of them that wasn't painful to look at are their wings, made from a shimmering blue white, the energy the Onmoraki fed on from other spirits of the recently dead. They were scavengers rather than hunters.

Pai glanced at Shiori's necklace. None of the Yori Chiisai around them were strong enough to sniff out her scent through the aura from the feather. Still, she didn't like the idea of not being close to Shiori, so near to the time when all the little monsters came out to play.

She felt...it felt like something was off. There was something wrong, and she couldn't quite put a finger on it, and she didn't know why she was so sure of it, only that she felt it like a ball of ice sitting in the pit of her stomach. It made her feel sick.

Shin's words came back to her. In her mind's eye, she saw Shin, the dark look in his eye as he watched her, saying those words that stuck to her even now, hours later.

"Remember that some Ayakashi can get past your aura. Don't rely too much on it."

But when she looked at Shiori, at the tense look on her face and the way she shuffled from side to side and bit her lip, she cuoldnt think up of any viable excuse to tell her.

The ramen and udon shop was just down the street. They were almost home. A small detour like this was fine.

Still hesitant, she said, "Please hurry, Shii-chan. We have to be home before six."

"Don't worry, we'll get there way before that." Shiori answered, calm and unruffled, since it was only just gone past five. She turned, waving, and said, "Wait for me here, I'll be right back!" and briskly jogged down the street to the shop, her tall and willowy form turning heads as she breezed past people walking down the street.

"As if I'd go anywhere," Pai muttered to herself. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched Shiori disappear into the shop, the weird anxiety plaguing her seeming to double in strength the second she didn't have eyes on Shiori any longer.

She started pacing, as much to keep warm in the growing chill of dusk as to vent out her worry. Though Shiori should have been more aware of the constant danger around her now that she was seventeen, she still acted like everything was fine, like nothing had changed at all.

She wondered if it was because Shiori felt like everything would be fine if she just acted like it was.

Even this whole situation about going to school – the safest thing for Shiori to have done was allow Kouta to hire a private tutor who would come in and give her lessons every weekday at the house. As far as Pai could see, it was not like Kouta couldn't afford it. Shiori would still complete her high school education – maybe not in the usual way, but she'd still get it, and much as Shiori complained about school, Pai knew that she wanted to get her high school degree.

Shiori adamantly refused. She said she wanted to live as ordinary a life she could, unburdened by the role she was born into. That meant attending high school as any other teenage girl would.

But she wasn't just an ordinary girl, and that was something Pai could see Shiori just did not want to accept.

Pai walked over to stand beside the sign post for the bus stop, wanting to feel some modicum of safety under the small roof over her head as she waited for Shiori. She took her phone out of her handbag and tapped the screen to life. She scrolled through her contacts list. She had the numbers of all the Daitengu, Shiori, Kouta, Ryu, and Obaasan saved on her phone.

Her thumb hovered uncertainly over Shin's phone number. She shook her head and scrolled down to Kouta's, then Daichi's, and she almost tapped the key 9, to activate the emergency phone number, before she shook her head and clicked the side of the phone, locking it and turning the screen a dead black.

It's nothing, she thought, trying to infuse confidence that wavered in her. I'm just being paranoid. There isn't any need to bother them with this. Pai, stop being a paranoid idiot.

No matter how much comfort she tried to pry from her own words, none was forthcoming.

The street was still crowded with people, although less so up closer to the shrine. Yosei and Goryo floated through the crowds while Onmoraki flew above people's heads. Streaks of white light shimmered in the air behind the bird-demons. Some electric lights from the poles lining the street were beginning to flicker on in preparation for night.

Everything was as it should be, a normal late afternoon day with people going about their own business.

Pai couldn't shake off the feeling that someone – something – was watching her. She was unbelievably hot too, as if it was the middle of summer rather than almost the end of autumn. She tapped her foot on the ground in an incessant rhythm as she swiped a hand over her forehead, wondering at the abrupt rise in temperature. She still felt the ice cold of the Yori Chiisai around her, but it was muted by this heat. Already, the back of her shirt was starting to stick to her skin.

She frowned. What the hell is this? Why was she so hot? Did she have a fever or something?

Shin's words repeated themselves back at her in an endless loop. Remember that some Ayakashi can get past your aura. Don't rely too much on it.

She looked up the road, to the shrine, where a pair of gold-coated Komainu stood guard at the front of the shrine. She knew that come nightfall, they wouldn't look like statues made of gold anymore, but would become real-life lion dogs that patrolled the shrine's grounds, protecting the holy place and the Kamigami that supposedly resided within from any Ayakashi that dared come too close.

Pai was about to stand up to go where she had been standing when Shiori left, when a sound whistled through the air, and something sharp pricked the back of her neck.

She jumped in surprise, dropping her handbag and moving away from the bus signpost onto the road. The base of her neck stung like something had just cut her. She looked behind her, but there wasn't anything there; just a souvenir's shop half-hidden by thick brush. The shadows in the leaves looked menacing enough that a shiver of unease pierced her heart.

She frowned as she reached back to rub her neck, wondering what just happened, still trying to peer through the dark surrounding the souvenir's shop. What just touched her? Or was she imagining it, what with how keyed up she was?

She froze when she found the back of her neck to be wet and slick. When she brought her hand down and looked at it, she saw her fingers coated in blood and some transparent liquid. Warmth dripped down the back of her neck, sliding past the collar of her shirt, staining it.

She was...dizzy. She swayed unsteadily on her feet as she took another step back from the dark before her. The hill road – it was – was it getting closer?

She was so disoriented, her eyes moving sluggishly around as she tried to turn, to walk away. Why was the world tilting?

What's...what's happ – happen...?

Her vision blinked out into darkness as she slumped in a dead faint a second later.