Free Eight Million Gods-eARC by Wen Spencer Page A

police, they’d probably arrest her for two murders.
    But if she didn’t call the police, she would still have a homicidal maniac stalking her.
    She felt someone next to her, staring.
    Nikki leapt to the side, bringing up the wrapped sword to block an attack.
    There was no one there.
    “Shit!” She was shaking, though. For one split second, she could have sworn there was a Japanese teenage boy standing beside her, his dark eyes furious.
    She started to walk fast, blindly fleeing into the night.

    She was trying not to run. Running would make her easier to track. She walked fast, weaving through the heavy crowds moving through Umeda Station. She didn’t care if she was lost; all that mattered was putting distance between her and Osaka Station. She took random turns, going up escalators and down elevators and in and out of the stores.
    Just when she thought she was hopelessly lost, she saw a sign for the Tanimachi subway line. She danced in place as she checked the map to figure out the cost of the ticket, fed a ten thousand yen bill into the ticket machine, grabbed her ticket and change ,and bolted through the gate. There was a train sitting at the platform as she ran down the steps. She made the car just as the “door closing” chime sounded. There was no one else running for the train. The door closed and the train pulled out.
    She slumped down on the bench seat and stared at the bundled sword still clutched in her hand. Some loon had hacked her computer, read her book, and was using it as inspiration. He had stuck a blender into Gregory Winston’s stomach and set it to puree. There might be a seventeen-year-old girl dead and raped in Kyoto.
    What the hell was she going to do? The police already knew she had a crazy fan. Would telling them about these new twists help them catch the man? Probably. But what could she tell them without making it seem like she had something more to do with the murders?
    She could give them a copy of her manuscript on a flash drive. She could even tell them most of the truth. She believed her computer had been hacked, and she was scared. They were cops; they could fit the pieces together without her.
    She would have to do something with the sword—like throw it in the canal since it now had her DNA and fingerprints on it. Hopefully it was a replica and not some real and irreplaceable antique. Surely her fan wasn’t so insane that he had stolen something so valuable and then left it in a coin locker.
    One thing was for certain—her life was about to get a whole lot crazier.
    “Oh, this sucks,” she whispered. “Bad enough that I write this shit, now I have to live it?”
    She couldn’t stop writing. Even if she could magically cure her hypergraphia, she still would have to finish the novel. If she didn’t, she would have to give back the money that her publisher had already paid her. All of it—even the part she’d already spent.
    She didn’t know how her stalker was hacking her laptop; she thought she had made it secure. She had online “friends” that were computer experts, but none of them were close and trusted. Anyone she asked for help might be the very person who had hacked her computer. She’d never met any of them face-to-face and had to hope what they told her was true. One of them could be lying and lived in Osaka.
    There was the little policeman, Yoshida. She could ask him for help.
    Now that she thought of it, though, it was weird that of the hundreds of restaurants in Osaka, the one he chose after processing Gregory’s murder was the same one she met Miriam in to talk about her novel. She had emailed with Miriam about where to eat. Could he have intercepted those messages?
    He was an anime fan. He might visit the same forums that she did. He could be one of her many online “friends” and she wouldn’t know.
    But he was so tiny. The police said—no— Yoshida said that the attacker was much taller.
    She slipped her cell phone out to call Miriam and then