Free A Mortal Song by Megan Crewe Page B

curtains hid all view of the interior. Chiyo opened the gate. Keiji leaned his bike against the fence.
    Takeo glanced around to make sure no one was watching and then nodded to me. We shifted back into corporeal form. Haru flinched, but Keiji just grinned.
    “If you can do that, does that mean I can too?” Chiyo asked, cocking her head. “Invisibility would be really useful for dodging questions in class.”
    I recognized Takeo biting back a grimace. “It’s how we survive,” he said. “If we couldn’t hide, humans would stumble on us all the time. And we can’t assume all of them would be kind.”
    “Is he always so gloomy?” Chiyo asked me. Without waiting for a response, she breezed past us with a swish of her lavender ponytails.
    Six days, I thought as we followed her into the house. We had six days to make this girl into a kami focused enough to defeat a demon and an army of the dead.
    “Mom!” Chiyo said brightly, kicking off her shoes. “I’ve brought home a couple of kami who want me to save Mt. Fuji.”
    A sharp clink sounded from somewhere farther inside, like a dish set down abruptly. A middle-aged woman appeared in the hall. Her searching gaze took in her daughter and the small crowd of us standing behind her. With a twitch of her fingers, she tucked her chin-length hair behind her ears. Hair as thick and straight as mine, by a chin as sharply curved into her slim, pale face. My breath stopped in my throat.
    Then I registered her expression. Her eyes and the set of her thin mouth held no surprise or disbelief, only a sort of sad resignation.
    I hadn’t given much thought to wondering how aware Chiyo’s adoptive family had been, hadn’t realized I would care, but in that moment the understanding struck me like a blow to the ribs.
    This woman had known. She’d known she’d traded one daughter for another. It hadn’t been some secret trade in the dark of night, with my human parents remaining none the wiser.
    My birth mother had given me up willingly.
    “Well,” she said, her voice strained. Her hands twisted together in front of her. “Well. Would you come in? I’ll make some tea.”

7
    C hiyo’s mother — my mother, actually, a voice in my head reminded me—insisted that we couldn’t talk until Chiyo’s father got home. She ushered us into the living room and then hurried to the kitchen. The urgent murmuring of her voice into the phone carried through the wall.
    I wanted to protest that we had no time to spare, that the mountain couldn’t wait, but the tightness around her mouth as she handed out cups of tea kept those words locked in my throat. Takeo stayed silent as well, though I could see the tension in his sinewy arms as he lifted his cup to his lips.
    We couldn’t force Chiyo to come with us. She clearly still had her doubts. If we started pushing her or her parents too hard, I could easily imagine her balking completely.
    After a stretch of sipped tea and awkward silence, the front door opened. I braced myself as Mr. Ikeda stepped into view, but there was nothing fearsome about the slight, smooth-faced man who nodded to Takeo and me with a stiffness that contradicted his spoken welcome. Plainly our arrival wasn’t completely unexpected to him either. Both of my human parents had agreed to send me off to Mt. Fuji, to be parted from me for years.
    There wasn’t really space for all of us in that small room. Haru, Chiyo, and Mrs. Ikeda were squeezed together on the small couch, and Mr. Ikeda sat in the armchair beside it. I couldn’t help noticing the muscles in his long-fingered hands as he clasped them together, wondering if he was the one who played the piano in the corner. Had my love for music come to me through him?
    I squashed down that question and the others tugging at my mind. This wasn’t about me. It was about saving the mountain. What were Mother and Father going through there as this meeting dragged out?
    Keiji had dropped onto the piano bench, and Takeo and I