A Winter of Ghosts (The Waking Series) Read online

  A Winter of Ghosts

  by Thomas Randall and Christopher Golden

  Copyright 2013 by Christopher Golden

  First Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, events, dialog, and situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the author.

  Cover art copyright 2013 by Lynne Hansen

  Book design by Lynne Hansen

  http://LynneHansen.zenfolio.com

  http://www.LynneHansen.com

  Art credits:

  "Horror" copyright dollgoddess-stock -

  http://dollgoddess-stock.deviantart.com/gallery/

  "Japanese Seamless Pattern" copyright Losswen -

  http://www.dreamstime.com/losswen_info

  DEDICATION

  For Lynne Hansen. Thanks for all of your hard work and lovely covers.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  A Winter of Ghosts

  About the Authors

  Other Works by the Authors

  Chapter One

  Winter had come to Miyazu City, yet instead of the silence and darkness it so often promised, it had brought Kara Harper happiness and renewal. Most people making their way through the shop-lined streets of downtown Miyazu seemed trapped in a long, grim hangover now that the holidays were over. The city had to return to business as usual. In two days, school would start again and Kara would have to do the same, but she was looking forward to it.

  A new year. After the nightmares come to life that had plagued her first two terms at Monju-no-Chie school, she relished the idea of a fresh start.

  "Hey, lovebirds, wait up!" she called in English, hurrying to match stride with her father, Rob, and his girlfriend, Yuuka Aritomo.

  Her dad and Miss Aritomo were both teachers at Monju-no-Chie, a private school on the outskirts of Miyazu City, where he taught English and American Studies, and she taught art. Their relationship had taken Kara a lot of getting used to — her mother had been dead only two years — but she had come to accept it. For a long time she had worried that her father would never be happy again, but it had still been hard for her when he had fallen in love. Now, though, she knew that his love for Yuuka didn't mean he had stopped loving, or missing, Kara's mother.

  It helped that Kara had also fallen for someone. After all that they had endured, it seemed so improbable that she and her father would both be so happy at the same time, but she never spoke about the unlikeliness of their good fortune because she did not want to jinx it. Kara had definitely had enough of curses to last her a lifetime.

  "You're speaking English?" her father said, arching an eyebrow. "Do you want to look like a tourist?"

  Kara grinned, switching to Japanese. "Dad, it isn't like they can't tell we're tourists."

  Miss Aritomo chuckled softly. Kara liked it when she laughed. She was a very pretty woman, delicate and graceful, but being around Rob Harper had seemed to allow Yuuka Aritomo to exhale a little. Japanese culture had so much to do with what was proper and correct that, to Kara, most of the adults always seemed stiff and serious. But her father and Miss Aritomo had given each other reasons to smile.

  "I don't know how you talked me into this," her father said.

  "I didn't talk you into anything," Kara insisted. "I need boots. It's winter, in case you hadn't noticed."

  "It's not like we've had much snow —"

  "My feet are cold!"

  "You have boots, Kara," he said.

  Kara rolled her eyes and looked to Miss Aritomo for help.

  "Her boots are old and ugly and barely fit her," the art teacher said.

  "Exactly!" Kara said, linking arms with Miss Aritomo. "See, Dad, women understand this stuff."

  He sighed. "All right, where's the shop again?"

  Kara made a small, gleeful noise and linked her other arm through her father's, hurrying the two adults along the street. "It's just up here!"

  Miyazu City seemed to have a hundred different neighborhoods, from lovely parks to teeming business districts, from upscale suburbs to moldering apartment complexes, and from busy roads lined with markets to gentrified shopping areas. Kara found them all interesting in their own right, and nearly always took her camera with her when she went into the city. What she loved most of all was the way that ancient arches and temples and shrines could be found in the unlikeliest of places, and the juxtaposition of the cityscape with the low mountains on one side, or the blue waters of Miyazu Bay on the other. Visually, it was a fascinating place to live.

  Now she marched her dad and Miss Aritomo along the sidewalk of a street lined with markets and noodle shops, passing a fabric store and a butcher's. The aroma of cooking noodles and frying foods wafted from stalls and open doors. She could still taste the squid she'd had for lunch. They were fried in long strips that reminded her of churros, and though they were nearly always chewy, she had come to like squid prepared that way.

  Men in uniform swept the street and people rode in all directions on bicycles, the last snow having melted from the stone street days before, although the mountains were still capped with white. Telephone wires crisscrossed above them, poles and lamp posts only slightly more numerous than the vending machines that popped up on every block.

  On the corner ahead, three pine trees had been left standing around a small shrine. Kara steered her dad and Miss Aritomo to the right and onto a street that sloped gently down toward Miyazu Bay. From here, they could see Ama-no-Hashidate, the finger of white sand and black pines that jutted across Miyazu Bay and was considered one of the three most beautiful sites in Japan. Kara had taken hundreds of photos of the bay and of Ama-no-Hashidate, and though she thought she had probably used enough film on it, she still found the sight beautiful. It cheered her even more and she picked up the pace.

  "Slow down, daughter," her father said. "What's the rush?"

  "It's not my fault you're old."

  "Okay, that's enough teasing me around my girlfriend," he said.

  Kara laughed. "Yuuka loves you anyway. Don't you, Yuuka?"

  Miss Aritomo blushed slightly as they hurried along, arm in arm. "I think I love him a little more when you tease him. I want to protect him from abuse."

  Kara bumped her gently as they walked. "No you don't."

  "But I do!" the woman protested.

  "Maybe you should keep it up then, Kara," her father said.

  They passed a music shop, a small bookstore, and what seemed like a dozen clothing stores. Two feuding pizza restaurants stood on opposite sides of the street, facing one another. Kara had tried them both and thought the crappy little joint down the street from her favorite noodle shop was much better, and much cheaper. Her two best friends, Sakura and Miho, had showed her the best places to buy clothes and hair accessories and music, but her boyfriend, Hachiro, could be counted on to bring her to the tastiest and most out of the way restaurants in Miyazu City.

  "Kara," Miss Aritomo said, "I've been meaning to remind you. School starts again in two days. When we are around other teachers and students — even your friends — you cannot call me Yuuka. It isn't —"

  "I know," Kara said. "It isn't proper."

  The temptation to tease Miss Aritomo about Japanese propriety, especially when it came to sleeping with her father, was great, but she knew the woman would be absolutely mortified and did not want to embarrass her like that. After the horrors they had endured at the beginning of the fall, the death they had seen and the curse that had now touched them all, the rest of the fall term had passed
so quietly as to allow them a cautious optimism. And the holidays had been nothing short of joyful.

  Only a tiny fraction of the Japanese population identified itself as Christian — most were Buddhist or Shinto — but Japan had long ago embraced Christmas. People ate a special cake on Christmas Eve, which was considered a night of romantic miracles. Being with your significant other that night was a big deal, and Hachiro had called her from home and spent an hour telling her how much he wished he could be with her to celebrate the night. It meant a lot to her because she knew it meant a lot to him.

  She and her father had chosen to celebrate as Japanese a Christmas as possible, exchanging small gifts with each other and with Miss Aritomo, who had joined them for dinner both on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Kara had received a locally made Teddy bear and a small emerald ring from her father, and Miss Aritomo had brought her flowers and a hand-knit scarf. Kara had bought Yuuka a small handbag with her own money, and her father had given her a necklace that Kara had helped pick out.

  Yet, though Christmas displays were often up just as early as they were in America, the New Year was a much bigger deal in Japan. People started preparing for New Year's celebrations even before Christmas, sending tons of New Year's cards called nengajo to their families, friends, and colleagues. Marking the passage of the old year and recognizing the affection or support that others had given them, as well as their hope for the relationship to continue in the new year, was a major part of the celebration. People spent the time leading up the end of the year cleaning their homes and offices, inside and out. The faces of buildings — even temples — were cleaned, painted, or refreshed in some other way.

  It had all sounded sweetly sentimental to Kara, right up until New Year's Eve, when she and her father had gone out for a dinner of toshikoshi soba noodles at a sobaya shop and encountered an almost comical number of drunken people. Almost comical, because it stopped being funny when she saw a man walk into a lamp post, bloodying his nose and lip. It turned out that New Year's Eve in Japan was soaked in even more alcohol than the holiday was back home in Massachusetts, and that was saying something.

  Still, they had enjoyed it. Miss Aritomo had gone to her uncle's for dinner, but returned to watch the various celebrations on television at their house and ring in the new year with a toast at midnight, stepping outside to listen to the bells tolling from the city's Buddhist temples. There were other traditions, of course. Many people would be at the shrines, offering prayers and hoping to receive a promising fortune scroll from one of the maidens in white kimonos who looked after the shrines that night. But Kara and her father and Miss Aritomo had opted to stay at home. Yuuka had spent the night for the first time, and had made them ozoni, the traditional New Year's soup, the next day.

  They felt like a family.

  Kara tried not to think of it that way — she still struggled with the idea that she was somehow betraying her mother — but sometimes she couldn't help it. She liked that her father was happy. He deserved it. She thought they both did.

  Now, as she made her way toward the shop where she had seen the perfect boots for winter, arm-in-arm with her dad and Yuuka, several older people looked at them oddly. They did make an interesting trio. Miss Aritomo usually tried to hold on to her very Japanese propriety when out in public with them, but at the moment, she apparently couldn't keep the grin off of her face.

  "Here we are," Kara said, guiding them into the shop.

  "How much are these boots, anyway?" her father finally thought to ask.

  Kara gave him an innocent look. "Dad, they're lined and waterproof. Can you put a price tag on keeping your loving daughter's feet warm and dry?"

  He gave a good-natured sigh. "That much, huh?"

  Inside the shop, where several customers were lined up at the register and others milled about, trying on winter coats and boots, Kara stopped and batted her lashes at him.

  "Not that much, but . . ."

  "But?"

  "There's this jacket you're going to love just as much as I do. White and gold and puffy —"

  Her father turned to Miss Aritomo and hung his head. "Save me."

  The art teacher laughed and nodded to Kara. "Go on. Show us these boots."

  Kara gave a little squee and darted through the racks, leaving the adults to weave a path behind her. She really did need boots and a new jacket, and had known that her father would buy them for her, but she always enjoyed tormenting him just a little bit. They teased with love, never with malice.

  Fathers and daughters, her mother had often sighed. They'll indulge each other forever.

  Kara thought maybe her mom had been right.

  After persuading her father that the white coat with the fake fur around the hood was an absolute necessity — with a little help from Miss Aritomo — Kara waited in line with him to pay. Someone had apparently gone on a break and left an old woman with a cranky, pinched face as the only clerk. Kara dared not complain about the wait. Instead, she leaned her head on her father's shoulder.

  "Thanks, Dad."

  "It's okay," he said. "I don't want my little girl's toes freezing off."

  "Yuck. Me either."

  "So, everyone's due back tomorrow, right?" he asked.

  Kara smiled. By 'everyone,' he meant her two best friends, Miho and Sakura, and Hachiro, but he tried not to pry too much into her feelings for her boyfriend. She didn't mind talking about Hachiro with her father, actually, but he seemed very wary about seeming too curious, which was probably for the best. As long as she was happy and Hachiro was treating her well, he didn't need to know any more than that.

  Despite what her mother had always said, boyfriends were the one area where fathers didn't always indulge their daughters.

  ". . . that's terrible," Miss Aritomo said. "How did she die?"

  Kara and her father both turned to see the teacher talking to a short, fiftyish man whose glasses were too big for his face. His expression was grim.

  "She became lost on the mountain during the first snowstorm we had last month," the man said, shaking his head slowly, mouth set in a thin line. "They searched for her after the storm, but two days passed before they found her. She had frozen."

  Kara flinched at the word. "God," she whispered, in English.

  Miss Aritomo expressed her sorrow at the news and the man with the big glasses — who Kara now realized was an employee here, but also someone the teacher knew — nodded again. Or perhaps they were small bows, accepting her condolences.

  The conversation went on, but Kara had had enough.

  "I'm going to look at gloves," she said, forcing a smile.

  "You already have gloves," her father said.

  "I didn't say 'buy.' I'm just looking," she replied, and then she was off, heading over to a circular display upon which hung what seemed hundreds of pairs of gloves.

  Things had been going so well. They were happy. Kara had had enough of death and ugliness and did not even want to hear about any more of it.

  As she searched for a pair of gloves that would match her new jacket, not really intending to ask her father to buy them, but curious, she heard soft voices whispering behind her, and then one of them spoke up.

  "Well, hello, bonsai. Happy New Year."

  Mai Genji had seemed to be her nemesis for a while. She had inherited the position of Queen of the Soccer Bitches when the reigning queen, a girl named Ume, had been expelled during the spring term. Ume had told Mai about the impossible, awful things that had happened in April of last year — about the curse that the demon Kyuketsuki had put on Kara and Sakura and Miho — and for a time Mai had blamed Kara for Ume's expulsion and for the horrible things that had followed it, during the autumn term.

  Now Mai knew better, and she had a long, thin white scar on her right cheek that would remind her every time she looked in the mirror. Now she knew that it had all started with Ume, whom they all suspected of having murdered Sakura's sister, Akane.

  Kara's first year in Japan
had been long and strange and sometimes awful. And though the curse still lingered, and she worried that it would draw even more evil to her and her friends, she wanted to focus on the new beginning that the winter term offered.

  So she smiled at the Queen of the Soccer Bitches, and at her roommate, Wakana, who had nearly been killed herself back in the fall.

  "Happy New Year," Kara said.

  They shared a dreadful secret, something other students at Monju-no-Chie school would never believe and should never have to learn, and it had created a strange bond between them. Mai and Wakana weren't her friends, and they never would be, but maybe they weren't enemies any more, either.

  "Your father and Miss Aritomo look very happy," Mai said, an edge to the words that seemed on the verge of mockery.

  Kara bristled. No way would she put up with anyone saying anything about her dad and Yuuka.

  "They are," she said.

  To her surprise, both girls smiled. They looked at each other and then back at Kara.

  "They're really cute together," Wakana said.

  "We're glad for them," Mai added, and then her smile vanished. "I'll see you in home room."

  "Yeah," Kara said. "I'll see you."

  The two girls turned and meandered off through the racks, whispering to each other in a way that she knew she should have assumed meant they were gossiping about her. But she didn't think they were. They had lives, just like she did. Families. They had probably enjoyed the holidays with the people they loved, and now it was a new year.

  No, they would never be friends.

  But maybe it really was a new beginning for all of them.

  Hachiro had seen a lot of impossible things since Kara had come into his life, but never a ghost. The one on the train back to Miyazu City to begin the winter term was his first.

  Late that Monday night, just a couple of days after New Year's, he sat aboard the busy train, head lolling against the window, lights strobing across the dark glass as the express shot through some commuter station without slowing down. His parents had struggled trying to decide when to drive him back to school and who would take him, so Hachiro had suggested they let him take the train back to Miyazu. At first they had balked, but he had appealed to reason. He knew they loved him, but they both worked and he could take care of himself. Logic triumphed, and now he found himself returning to Monju-no-Chie school a day earlier than he'd planned.