Eight Million Gods-eARC by Wen Spencer Read Free Book Online Page B

wouldn’t be trying to lock her up. Horrible things happened to her nice and not-so-nice and sometimes outright nasty characters. It had been a graphic disembowelment—complete with descriptions of steaming coils of intestines—that triggered her first visit to a psychiatrist. Her novel attempts were usually wastelands of death, ending abruptly as all the characters met their untimely end. The novel she had sold had been a miracle of keeping the hero and heroine alive long enough to reach a happy ending. They died soon afterwards, but she chopped that part off.
    Good for her, since romantic thrillers were big. Bad for her, it meant that her next book also had to be a romantic thriller, and her publisher had given her only a year to write it. Between the two, Nikki decided to base the heroine on herself. “Natasha” was an up-and-coming-but-still-starving artist deeply in love with Japanese culture. While Natasha was leading a very safe but somewhat uninteresting life exploring Osaka, all her hero candidates had died—violently—without even meeting Natasha. George was just the most recent. Nikki was starting to worry about making her deadline. She needed a hero. A romantic hero. A stud muffin.
    Perhaps that was the problem. She wasn’t creating heavily armed, dangerous survivors. So far all the men were nice, normal people. Salarymen . Unarmed cream puffs. Very dead stud muffins. She needed a hero with a gun who knew how to use it.
    It was time for her to create an ass-kicking, name-taking hero.

    He felt like Death. He watched over the dead, dressed in black, wrapped in his own silence that no one disturbed. To those around him on the bystander side of the yellow police tape, the murder scene was strange and new, at once horrifying and fascinating. They were the people that lived in the nearby houses, drawn by the bright carnival of police lights, and now stood watching with eyes round and hands over their mouths.
    He was more familiar with death than even the Kyoto police on the other side of the barrier. The police understood the principles of snapping a neck. They recorded and documented the results with close study of murder victims. They had never reached out, grabbed tight of a living being, and given the hard twist and felt the struggling body go limp.
    He was Death, but this wasn’t his work. There was another killer in Kyoto. So he stood and watched.
    Police had brought in harsh work lights, trying to hold off the night as they investigated the murder scene. The uniformed officers were taking pictures: bright flashes of light against the darkness. A detective in a suit was questioning a woman. The witness was wearing a sheer baby-doll top and a miniskirt that was barely decent. She was dancing in place, trying to keep warm, shaking her head.
    “I told the other officer everything I know,” the witness said. “Can I go? I’m freezing.”
    “Miss Ogawa, I just have a few more questions,” the detective said. “You live near here?”
    “Yes. I told the other officer.” Miss Ogawa rubbed her arms. “I live just down the hill. I thought I heard my neighbor’s kitten crying. I was looking for it when I saw the foot sticking out of the pile of leaves.”
    “What’s your neighbor’s name?” the detective asked.
    “Fujita Yuuka,” Miss Ogawa said. “She’s a shrine maiden at Ikuta Shrine; the one that burned this afternoon.” She pointed up the hill toward the smoldering ruins of a Shinto shrine. “Can we walk down to my apartment, where it’s warm and I can answer these questions? I’ve been out here for hours now.”
    After the heat of the day, the night seemed chilly but it really wasn’t that cold. More likely, she wanted to get away from the dead body. The Japanese believed strongly in ghosts.
    The detective studied the house down the slope from the crime scene and then swept his gaze up the steep hillside to where the body lay. “You came all the way up here because of a cat