CHAPTER 4

Good schoolchildren don’t visit their schools at night without parental supervision and the teachers’ permission, as it’s technically trespassing. However, Kou was the King, so he didn’t care.

There’s also the issue of his mother not being around the vast majority of the time while his father was spiritually comatose, so he didn’t really have parental supervision at the moment, but that’s another story.

For now, the only thing in Kou’s mind was the darkness of his own school building.

“I’m begging for it to just show itself to us, seriously,” his sister quipped as they hopped over the closed gates. “You know very well neither of us could hypnotize yet. If the schoolguard sees us, we’re doomed.”

“We can always just lean down and turn into mist.”

“That disguise, in this place, at this time of the year? Good luck with that.”

“… you know what, that’s fair. Let’s just keep our steps light.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice.”

The moon wasn’t particularly bright that night, what with it being a little less than half-moon and all, and the clouds certainly didn’t help. Kou knew that Chi wouldn’t need any additional lights, and neither did he, thanks to their ability to see in the dark … but he’d really appreciate any support he could get. What he’s investigating now was, after all, a bit on the scarier end of things.

It was a child.

Ah, maybe putting it that way wasn’t really fair. They first got the tip-off from someone in the middle school division. It was a girl from the class next to Chi’s, who stayed a little late to wait for her crush who was in the basketball club and had to train late. It was supposed to be an evening just like any other. She was waiting for her young love out there in the corridor that connected the middle school building to the detached gymnasium, but around an hour before sundown, while the skies darkened a little from an overcast, she saw the silhouette of a young boy wearing traditional yukata peeking from the doors of the middle school building.

The boy ran the moment he was seen, but the girl was pretty sure she saw him.

The gossip made it quickly between the girls in her class, which was then spread to her friends, then to their friends, then to a Fukushi Kiba—a boy in Chi’s class, apparently—and then to Chi herself, who dismissed it as just the usual middle school scare.

“It’s like that Seven Mysteries thing, right? No need to worry about it.”

But her dismissal quickly bit her in the butt as another statement came around—this time from the high school division. The story this time came from an unassuming first-year boy, who was just waiting in the corridors for his friends from another class to finish their homeroom. He took a peek outside the window because he was bored with his phone, but when he saw the middle school building right across, he saw the same sight: the silhouette of a young boy, who quickly disappeared after he was spotted.

He tried telling this to his friends, but no one believed him. However, one of these boys was also friends with the current secretary of the student council, so the story made its way to stuco.

This resulted in Himiko’s own account. This time, it’s not something Chi could just dismiss.

“I thought it’s interesting, so why not?” Himiko said to Kou over their library date.

“Are you just saying this so you could skip stuco duty again?”

“I already have you to help with that, though?”

“Please don’t use me as an excuse….”

She agreed, and she kept her word. Her next excuse wasn’t Kou, but was instead her actual investigation into the sighting of the supposed ghost boy in the middle school building.

Himiko didn’t have to stay late or anything. She didn’t even visit the middle school division, not yet. All she did was make sure that she was alone, then she’d steal glances to the middle school division—after all, the two stories so far seemed to be accidental encounters. So she had to make it seem like an accident, right?

And she did.

She saw the kid.

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it on tape,” she said to Kou after class. It was a rare day where neither she nor Kou had any afterschool duty, so Kou was on his way to the school gates to wait for Chi to finish up. “Kid was too fast, I didn’t even get my camera on. I’ll tell you what I did find, though—I didn’t only see the boy, I felt him.”

She touched the cross on her choker. Kou caught that. “Spiritually?”

“No … not quite,” she said. “I’d say it’s closer to magic.”

Magic. The direct materialization of phenomenal changes in the spiritual layer of the world. The physical layer was shackled by the annoyance called the laws of physics: the conservation of energy, the laws of thermodynamics, the law of universal gravitation … you name it, the humans of old have gotten them all figured out and the humans to come would probably figure out even more. Reality, though, wasn’t so kind as to only exist physically, and it’s these other layers that were significantly more annoying. Sure, they weren’t bound by physics of all things, but it’s not like they don’t have rules.

It’s just that these rules were usually not the same ones as in physics, so the things that could be done there would’ve been physically impossible.

Magic was basically just translating the results of these things into the material realm. It’s making the spiritual physical, so to speak. Kou’s own vampiric traits, for example: he didn’t have the organs that could explain his superhuman strength. His body mass was perfectly average for a human boy, and he wasn’t particularly ripped or muscly, but he was superhuman nonetheless. How? Well, simply put, magic.

That strength was something essential to the existence of a ‘vampire’, and Kou was a vampire, so he had that strength. If that strength had to manifest physically, then it would. As simple as that.

A specific category of exorcists, the witch hunters, specialized in detecting these things.

Himiko wasn’t a witch hunter, but Kou had the feeling that she was equally sensitive.

“So you’re saying … someone is using magic to create a ghost boy at our school?”

“It sounds ridiculous if you put it that way, but yeah.”

“Hmm,” Kou turned to look at the middle school building. The sun was already partway approaching the horizon and was casting a shadow on the building. “Do you want to look into it?”

“Not sure,” she said. “I don’t like going to the middle school division, the kids are annoying.”

“I mean, my sister is there….”

“Oh, apart from her. Chi-chan’s cool.”

“Wait, I didn’t know you were acquainted with each other.”

“She’s probably the only girl in the middle school division whose name I’ve heard who wasn’t attached to any drama.”

“You followed their drama? Even though you said they were annoying?”

Himiko grinned. “It was exactly why I said they’re annoying. Anyway, I don’t wanna go there if possible. I guess I’ll wait it out for a few more days.”

Kou thought for a minute. “How do you create a ghost with magic, even?”

“There are a few ways,” Himiko said as she leaned on the walls that fenced the school. “The Greeks and some religions believed in necromancy, getting prophecies from the dead, and they had to use magic to summon the dead in order to do that. I think the Bible mentioned it as well. Vengeful onryou were created all the time in countless Japanese tales, and like with the infamous Okiku, some form of magic, like a curse, could be involved in the creation of one. You could also set up a very powerful kekkai right when somebody died, making it difficult for their spiritual half to part from the physical and keeping them around in the material plane. If you’re good, you can technically force these essences into shikigami and have the thing haunt places or people. It’s also possible to just find a spirit and use it to curse someone—that spirit will go and haunt them. Or….”

“… that’s more than a few ways.”

“What can I say? Humanity is a creative race.” She paused, clearly amused at her own remark. “No offense, Mister Vampire.”

“None taken, Miss Human. Maybe you’re right. The ghost hasn’t done anything, too. Let’s give it some time.”

However, when Kou reported this to Chi, she decided that they couldn’t give it some time. If it were just a simple ghost, she could wait all she likes until the ghost turns malicious, she said. A ghost that appeared due to magic, however, was a different story.

“We don’t know who cast the magic,” she said sharply on their way home that evening. “Magics that summon the dead like necromancy usually just keep them around for information—prophecies, secrets, treasures, that kinda thing. The ghost would be released after the ritual’s done. But this ghost persisted over a few days, and more importantly, it doesn’t talk.”

“So you’re saying this isn’t necromancy?”

“This is Japan. The ghost appeared in a Japanese school. To begin with, I highly doubt a Greek sorcerer’s behind this.”

“Chi, you do realize we descended from European vampires, right?”

“And neither of us can speak English, what’s your point?”

“Hey, not fair. I topped English in my class last semester.”

“You read English just fine, have you ever spoken the thing?”

Kou didn’t answer that.

“Anyway,” Chi continued, “as long as we don’t know what the magic is, we don’t know what the ghost was there for. If it’s there to curse someone, the entire middle school division could be in danger.”

Kou thought for a while. Chi had a point. Curses were, of course, more specific—it’s rare for a curse that small to be able to handle multiple people. If the ghost was there due to the compulsion of a curse, it shouldn’t hit more than one person. After all, humans were still part spiritual. Let alone vampires like Kou, even normal humans could sense when a curse was powerful enough. This ghost clearly wasn’t such a case.

That said, if Kou let the ghost be, there’s no telling when it would find its target, should there really be one. Until then, the odds of someone getting cursed was pretty much guaranteed. The problem was just whom.

Until they knew who that target was, everyone was a potential victim.

In all accounts of its discovery, the ghost never left the middle school building. Its hypothetical target had to be someone there.

Chi was right. The entire middle school division could be in danger.

“I haven’t had blood in a while, so I’ll drink some just in case,” Kou said. “Then we head back to school and go on a ghost hunt. What do you think?”

Chi nodded.

So that’s what they did. They got home, took a bath, got refreshed, drank some blood to make sure they’re in tip-top shape, and went to become bad schoolkids for the sake of catching the tail of a mage terrorizing their school that probably didn’t even exist.

“Not a lot to check on the first floor,” Chi said. “Teachers’ lounge, admin room, some of the clubrooms….”

“What about we check the place of first sighting?” Kou suggested. “The corridor between the school building and the gymnasium. The girl first saw the ghost when she was waiting there, right?”

Chi nodded. “Right.”

So they went there. Kou remembered helping his class with prep for the school’s cultural festival, which went rather late, but even then they didn’t stay at school until this hour. The gymnasium that was usually welcoming and brimming with the spirit of youth was cold and unresponsive when they arrived.

The siblings then just waited at the gym’s doors.

The gymnasium was a detached building. It was used by both the middle school and the high school division, and it was large enough to accommodate two classes’ worth of students at the same time. On both sides of the gymnasium, small outdoor corridors connected it to the high school building on one side and the middle school building on the other.

“The girl supposedly saw the ghost boy there,” Chi pointed to the doors of the corridor that led to the middle school building.

There was nothing.

They waited. Still nothing.

“Aren’t ghosts supposed to be more active at night?” Kou asked. Chi clicked her tongue.

“Yeah. Something doesn’t add up. Let’s check the other sighting spots.”

They entered the middle school building, climbed up the stairs, then carefully combed the corridor in front of the classes. The second floor was host to the third years’ classes. The corridor that faced the high school building was where the tenth grader boy saw the ghost.

“Should be right … there,” Chi said as they turned.

The corridor was dark. It didn’t stop the siblings, they could see in the dark.

That was how they knew there was nothing there.

“Are we supposed to be, like, not searching for it like this? Could it be part of the curse?”

“It could be, but wouldn’t it be pretty redundant to add this specific kind of defense to a curse?”

Chi talked about this before. Curses had a lot of defenses. Some were failsafes, because magic couldn’t be haphazardly performed. This was true for any kind of spell. It was really the reason why rituals often take a long time—unless you’re very good, casting a spell includes the safety measures to keep the caster safe and aligned with the spell’s intentions.

A misalignment could cause a rebound, and spell rebounds weren’t pretty. Worse yet, they could miscast and cause something else entirely.

Adding these safeties was already standard practice. Adding a very specific type of defense would just make the spell even more complicated to cast, and for what?

Kou thought again for a while. “I think I’m noticing something here,” he finally said. “The first time the ghost was seen, it was on the first floor. The second time was the second floor. The third time was when Himiko stole a glance from class—the second years’ classes are on the third floor.”

“So the ghost kept going up,” Chi summarized. “Is it checking each floor looking for its target?”

“Maybe. But there’s only one place here higher than the third floor, isn’t there?”

The siblings connected right away and just jumped to the stairs. They skipped over the entire flight to the third floor and kept going—just further up from there.

The rooftop.

It was locked, naturally, but Kou was thankful that he just recently drank blood.

Count Dracula was attributed with various traits. He was afraid of sunlight, for example—this was false. He bought an estate in London, so he definitely had some daytime dealings. He was attributed with fear of garlic—this was also false, as garlic wasn’t holy, it was just believed to be folk medicine for all ailments. He was said to control animals like wolves and rats—this was partially true, as he could bloodlink with them to influence their thoughts. He was also said to be a shapeshifter—also true, although it took a lot of effort for new vampires like Kou and Chi to lean into the spiritual and change their shapes.

Count Dracula was also attributed with limited teleportation and phasing through walls.

Both were true.

It took a bit of extra effort, even more than the leaning necessary to turn into literal mist, but Kou could feel his skin turning very cold, very tight, then very loose—the next thing he knew, he walked past the rooftop doors like there was nothing there.

Chi did just the same behind him, and with that, they were bathed again in the darkened moonlight.

The sky was still cloudy and unchanged. The moon was still hanging there as lazily as always.

The rooftop was deprived of any attraction, maintaining its functional status as literally just the average school building rooftop … except for that one boy there wearing a dark blue yukata.

Kou’s heart skipped a beat. There he was.

“Nii-chan,” Chi hissed.

“I got it,” he said. “Hello, there!”

Chi tugged on Kou’s sleeves like no tomorrow. “Nii-chan!”

“Are you the Ghost-san? Look, we just want to know why you’re here, okay? I hate fighting and all, it’s all so tiring. I just wanna talk.”

The ghost didn’t respond. Slowly, Kou approached him. Chi tensed up, but Kou caressed her hand to reassure her.

“Hello, Ghost-san?”

Slowly, the boy turned around.

The yukata was perfectly normal. It didn’t look particularly expensive or intricate, so the ghost wasn’t that of a rich kid or a thief.

The boy’s black hair was also cut in the typical bowl cut. Nothing noteworthy.

What was noteworthy was that, as soon as he finished turning, Kou realized that the boy lacked a face entirely.

*