Page 25 of Dragon 7

The Death Guardian walked over. When I first met her tonight, she’d pretended to be an old woman with a hunched back. She’d held her cane in a shaky hand.

Now, she prowled over tall and muscular. Her gray hair was out of the bun and hung white to her shoulder. A fierce expression covered her face as if she were more than ready to fight the war tonight.

I’m glad his mother’s people will help them beat the Fox.

Another woman walked beside her. She looked smaller and older. Her hair fell gray and light blue all the way down past her knees.

When they both stopped by the slab, they smiled at me.

The Death Guardian followed my stare. "You're looking at her hair. Everyone does at first."

I dragged my eyes from the gray-blue river of it.

"She is an Itako." The Death Guardian gestured to her. “Do you know what that is, Tora?”

“No.”

"It is a spirit medium. A woman who speaks to the dead. They come from the north of Japan. The Tōhoku region—Aomori, Akita, and Iwate. Cold country that’s far from the cities."

The woman kept that smile on her face.

"There are very few left." The Death Guardian studied me. "For hundreds of years, families in those mountains took their blind daughters and gave them to older Itako to raise.”

I couldn’t quiet my journalist mind. “Why only blind girls?”

“A blind girl could not marry nor work the land, but she could learn how to enter the parts of the spiritual world where others with sight could not."

Perhaps, I was stalling the pain that would come, but I had to know more. “How do you learn how to talk to the dead?”

The Itako gave me a soft nod. "So many ways, my child. But it starts through fasting until hunger stops mattering. Cold water poured over me in the dark, again and again, until my body forgot how to flinch. Years of silence within the depths of the earth."

Cold crawled down my open thighs.

I held still.

"And at the end. . .” That warm smile returned to her face. "I wed a spirit.”

I widened my eyes.

“You may think of it more as. . .a god. And. . .this allows me to have one foot in our world and one foot in. . .the other.”

“Good. All pleasantries are done. Now for why we came here tonight.” The Death Guardian looked at my phone next to me on the slab. “Did you talk to the Dragon?”

“Yes.” I swallowed hard. “Kenji is coming."

Several of the hoods turned toward one another and whispered to each other. Then every covered head turned to the Itako.

The Death Guardian looked at her too. "What do you see now?"

"Better timelines." The woman’s voice came out soft and then. . .to my horror. . .her eyes rolled into solid white.

I jerked back.

What the fuck?!

Those white eyes glowed. "Much better. Yes. Not all good. Not all bad, the way it ran before. The really bad timeline is gone now. Erased. There is hope. Victory is possible."

I shivered against the stone. "There was a really bad timeline?"