like homeless mad men standing on the corner, screaming insanity. She just happened to be sole witness to the discussion they were having with the universe.
But it really seemed like the man—the thing—had answered her question.
“Seriously?” she asked. “Do I look like a shrine maiden to you?”
He considered her a moment. “You can see me.”
She gasped and took another step backwards, crowding into the racks of lace and silk. “What are you?”
“I am a god. I am Yamauchi Kami. There seems to be many shrine maidens here, but none of them seem to be able to see me.”
He meant all the girls doing cosplay as shrine maidens. They were easy to spot with their bright red billowy trousers and crisp white kimono jackets. There were at least three in sight range; all Caucasian.
“You’re—You’re a Japanese god?”
“I am kunitsukami, or a god born in the land you know as Japan.”
The individual sentences made more sense than the normal ranting of the boogeymen Pixii had stumbled across earlier in her life, but put all together, it didn’t make a lick of sense. “What are you doing in Baltimore?”
“I am seeking something, but I am not here. Not completely. I have merely sent a seed of myself across the ocean to this land to find something that was lost.”
Still wasn’t making complete sense.
“Seems like a long way to go for a shrine maiden,” Pixii said. “Don’t you have a passel of them in Japan?”
“A shrine maiden is not what I came to find, but what I need at this moment. Are you one?”
The classic advice was if someone asked if you were a god, you said yes. Shrine maiden? This was not a position she thought she would find herself in, but of late, nothing was how she thought her life would turn out. She’d joined the military to prove that, despite her size, she could hold her own against anything. Time had taught her that “anything” was too broad a definition.
It seemed, though, that the safe answer was the honest one. “No.” But then her rampant paranoia got the best of her. “Why do you need one?”
“The shintai I’m using to travel the world is with a collection of other artifacts. One was a very dangerous yokai sealed within an urn. This morning, the urn was broken and the yokai released.”
“A yokai is a monster?”
“You would term it as such. It is a being that is not like humans or animals. It exists as a spirit that can take a form and manipulate the world about them.”
“Like a ghost?”
Yamauchi frowned at the question. “The two are nothing alike. It is more like a carnivorous plant than a ghost.”
“Carnivorous? It eats people?”
“Those it traps within its hold, yes.”
“If you’re a god, why don’t you seal it back up?”
“I am not here.” The god pointed at his sandaled feet. “You have those little things that you hold in your hand and people who are not there talk out of them? What appears before you is like the voice that comes from . . . ” He tapped his palm. “Those—those—talking things.”
He meant a cell phone—or at least—she thought he did.
“And you’re speaking English instead of Japanese . . . because?”
“The language I speak is not Japanese, but that of gods. You can understand it just the same as you can see an image that you recognize as a being. No one else can hear or see me.”
Right. Luckily, the Dark Pixii costume had a headset that could be mistaken for a Bluetooth device. She pressed a hand to it, pretending to listen to some real human conversation. “And how do I know you’re a god and not this monster trying to lure me into a trap?” At least at an anime convention, this was a totally reasonable discussion to be having. If anyone asked, she could be claim that she was taking part in one of the many LARP games currently running.
He reached out, making her flinch back and raise Dork Buster. “If you allow me, I can prove myself.”
“Don’t touch me,” she growled. She couldn’t back up any further.
“Very well.”
Pain flared in her left eye like it was on fire.
Note to self: don’t ask gods to prove themselves!
She tore off the eye patch and peeled up the bandage. What did he do to her? She looked at the dealer’s full-length mirror. Her left eye seemed perfect. Too perfect. That morning the pupil had been a smear of darkness across the iris. She slapped