Shadow

Chapter Six

Tomohiro

For a while I thought I was in control. There hadn’t been any more incidents, at least not ones that caught anyone’s attention. What was another scrape or gash on my arm? If it was contained to only me, then I considered it under control.

Not anymore. My hand shook as Nakamura-sensei wrote the kanji on the board.

“I know it’s the last day of class,” he chuckled, his fingers dusted white with chalk as he sketched each stroke, “but I don’t want any slackers, got it? One more lesson so you’re prepared for Year 3 History, ne?”

“Haiiiii,” droned the students, but I couldn’t speak. I stared at the name on the board.

Taira no Kiyomori. The one from the dream.

“So, who knows about Taira no Kiyomori?” Nakamura said. “Anyone?” A few tentative hands shot up. Definitely not mine.

“A samurai, right?” said Tanaka Keiko. I knew her vaguely, because a long time ago I’d been in Calligraphy Club with her brother, Ichirou. I couldn’t announce the connection to her, of course. That had been when it all started.

“More than a samurai,” Nakamura said. “He established the samurai-run government in the 12th century. He put his own son on the throne as emperor and staged a coup that changed everything for the samurai families. He also contributed heavily to the rebuilding of Itsukushima Shrine. But…” He paused dramatically, like my heart wasn’t already in my throat, like I wasn’t going to be sick. “There are rumors he wasn’t even from the Heike family, that his father wasn’t actually Taira no Tadamori.”

Nakamura leaned against his desk, looking at us with gleaming eyes.

“They called him the Monster,” he said. “The Demon Son.”

A monster. The shadows chasing him to the Torii outside Itsukushima Shrine—was it all real, then? Some sort of vision of the past? I’d thought it was just a nightmare.

“We don’t know much about his parentage, but he might have been an illegitimate heir to the throne. Or, if the rumors were true, his father was something far more sinister.”

“A demon?” Keiko laughed. “That’s just a story though.”

“Deshou,” said Nakamura, smiling. “I guess it couldn’t be true, could it?”

It could. It was. They had no idea what they were saying, but I did.

The Demon Son. Close enough to the truth about me. But I couldn’t accept it. I would run from myself, just like Taira had.

“Yuuto,” came a harsh whisper, and I looked over. Satoshi was nodding his head at my paper.  I looked down, startled by the sprawling mess of ink. The letters on my page were so badly blotted that they curled out in strange shapes, completely illegible.

“Too much caffeine,” I whispered back. I lifted my hand to show him how it was shaking. And I exaggerated, because Satoshi was the only one who suspected anything about me. I had to overdo it so he wouldn’t think anything was actually wrong.

“Right,” Sato said, rolling his eyes. “Lay off the good stuff for a bit, yeah? Nakamura will kick you off the kendo team if he sees you like that.”

I gave him the finger and he grinned while I turned the page in my notebook. But inside, my heart was pounding.

The letters weren’t blotted from a shaky hand. I was losing control.

When the bell rang, we stood and bowed to Nakamura before he left the classroom. I stretched as everyone started on today’s cleaning duty. Satoshi lifted his chair and threw it at me. I barely caught it in time.