Ink Stained

06: a sense of wrongness*

間違った感覚

Towards the end of the day, the four separate at the train station, Aoi leaving with Natsume to give Shuusei a present she bought for him. It was almost five o'clock by the time Pai and Shiori got to the road that led up to the shrine at the foot of the hill they lived on.

Shiori turned to Pai. "Hey, can you wait here for a second? I'm just going over to that shop to use the bathroom." She pointed at a ramen and udon shop a little ways down the right to their right.

Pai frowned. She didn't like the idea of them separating. "Can it wait? We are almost home?"

"Yeah, that's not going to work. I've been telling myself that for the last ten minutes, but I swear I'm going to burst. I am in pain, Pai-chan."

Pai paused, thinking. "Okay, I will come with you then."

Shiori rolled her eyes. "Come on, it's going to be fine." She held up the feather on her necklace. The slowly sinking sun glinted on the pale gold traces on the feather. "I have this with me, I'll be gone for five minutes tops, and there are hardly any Yori Chiisai around right now."

It was true. The only ones Pai could see were Yosei, merely little baubles of sparkling light as the sun sets, some silent Goryo wandering up and down the street and being driven through by passing cars when they crossed over onto the road, and a couple of Onmoraki flapping about.

Onmoraki, bird demons, created from the spirits of freshly dead corpses, looked as such and were incredibly weak. Their bodies were made from rotting flesh, feathers matted and dirty. Their faces looked like they had been bashed in with rocks, so much so that Pai couldn't tell if they once looked like pigeons or cranes. The only part of them that wasn't painful to look at are their wings, made from a shimmering blue white, the energy the Onmoraki fed on from other spirits of the recently dead. They were scavengers rather than hunters.

Pai glanced at Shiori's necklace. None of the Yori Chiisai around them were strong enough to sniff out her scent through the aura from the feather. Still, she didn't like the idea of not being close to Shiori, so near to the time when all the little monsters came out to play.

She felt...it felt like something was off. There was something wrong, and she couldn't quite put a finger on it, and she didn't know why she was so sure of it, only that she felt it like a ball of ice sitting in the pit of her stomach. It made her feel sick.

Shin's words came back to her. In her mind's eye, she saw Shin, the dark look in his eye as he watched her, saying those words that stuck to her even now, hours later.

"Remember that some Ayakashi can get past your aura. Don't rely too much on it."

But when she looked at Shiori, at the tense look on her face and the way she shuffled from side to side and bit her lip, she cuoldnt think up of any viable excuse to tell her.

The ramen and udon shop was just down the street. They were almost home. A small detour like this was fine.

Still hesitant, she said, "Please hurry, Shii-chan. We have to be home before six."

"Don't worry, we'll get there way before that." Shiori answered, calm and unruffled, since it was only just gone past five. She turned, waving, and said, "Wait for me here, I'll be right back!" and briskly jogged down the street to the shop, her tall and willowy form turning heads as she breezed past people walking down the street.

"As if I'd go anywhere," Pai muttered to herself. She crossed her arms over her chest and watched Shiori disappear into the shop, the weird anxiety plaguing her seeming to double in strength the second she didn't have eyes on Shiori any longer.