A Curse that Smells Like Peaches

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The door to Ryouma’s room burst open, startling him awake.

“Master! Wake up, Master!” Xiǎomíng panted from having sprinted up the stairs.

“What is it now, you noisy brat?” Ryouma groaned, still groggy. He pulled the blanket over his head. “I’m trying to sleep.”

“S-Suwa M-Midoriko! And G-Good Girl!”

Ryouma shot up, fully awake now. “What happened?”

“It’s– You just…You have to see!” the boy urged.

Ryouma followed Xiǎomíng down the stairs to the main floor, where Midoriko was staying. A myriad of scenarios ran through his head, each one worse than the last. What he didn’t—or couldn’t—imagine, though, was the scene unfolding in the kitchen.

At the table sat Good Girl, happily munching on some onigiri, in a completely unrecognizable state. Her once long and disheveled hair had been cut into a short bob reminiscent of a kokeshi doll. The oversized clothes she typically wore were now rolled shorter and held in place with a random assortment of hardware–safety pins, rubber bands, and clips.

“Good morning, Papa! Good morning, Xiǎomíng-nii!” she said, smiling brightly.

Just then, Midoriko entered the kitchen from the garden, carrying a plate of carrots.

“Luckily, the bugs and animals didn’t seem to get to these while they were left outside,” she said, setting the plate on the table in front of Good Girl. Midoriko patted Good Girl’s head while she inhaled the rest of her onigiri. “Is it good?”

“Mhm! Ish tayshty!”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, okay?” Midoriko gently scolded, wiping grains of rice off Good Girl’s cheek.

Ryouma finally overcame his shock and found his words once more. “...How are you still alive?”

Midoriko, finally noticing the two men hovering around the doorway, flinched in surprise. Then she locked onto Ryouma and glared.

“I should be asking you that same thing,” she muttered.

“What?”

Midoriko put her hands over Good Girl’s ears. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now with my bare hands for neglecting your own daughter like this.”

“Pfft!” Xiǎomíng snickered, then quickly covered it with a throat clear.

Daughter…? Ryouma realized in that moment that he’d always allowed Good Girl to refer to him as “Papa.” Furthermore, after the unplanned introduction the night before, he’d completely forgotten to explain the presence of the child to this woman.

“That’s–” Ryouma stammered, rubbing his temples. “Um. There’s been a misunderstanding. Let’s talk.”

***

“So she kills people if she touches them?” Midoriko asked flatly. She wore a thousand-yard stare as she sat next to Ryouma on the veranda overlooking the Japanese garden.

Good Girl, as it turned out, was not Ryouma’s daughter. She was a child with a terrible curse that he had rescued from a yakuza group two years prior. The gang had been using the child to carry out hits. All she had to do was touch someone, and the end result would look like a natural death. Perfectly clean.

“Yes. But it seems like it doesn’t work unless she makes direct contact,” Ryouma explained with a shrug. “That’s how I was able to grab her bundled up in the blanket last night.”

Midoriko shot Ryouma a look of horror and betrayal. “And you didn’t tell me this, why?”

“Tehe…I forgot,” he said, scratching the back of his head.

“Not ‘tehe’!” she hissed, gripping the collar of his yukata. “I had no idea! I could have died!”

“But you didn’t.” He gently removed her hands from his yukata and readjusted the collar. “And I think it’s got something to do with that ability of yours.”

Midoriko scratched her head. “Which one? The curse-cleansing or the neutralizer thing?”

“Both actually.”

Midoriko was surprised by this answer. Ryouma seemed deep in thought, so she waited patiently for him to continue.

“I don’t know much about neutralizers–you’re actually the first I’ve ever encountered. But curses and magic? It’s all the same.” Ryouma put his hands behind his back as he reclined on the veranda.

“That’s news to me. How so?”

“You mentioned during your lecture at the museum that a person who believes they are cursed gives power to that curse through their belief in it.”

“Yes, it’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy in psychology. If they believe a curse will bring them misfortune, then they’ll attribute every bad thing that happens to them to the curse,” she confirmed. Midoriko cast him a sideways glance. “I’m surprised you were actually listening.”

“Of course I was. It was interesting,” he said with a chuckle. “Right, well, that doesn’t necessarily make the curse real, as you probably know.”

Midoriko let out an exasperated sigh. His roundabout way of speaking exhausted her sometimes. “Just get to the point you were trying to make.”

“Right, right. You prefer when I’m direct,” he said, nodding. Sitting up again, he continued. “Magic works much in the same way—but in reverse. If I will it, it happens because I believe it will. Granted, there’s a lot of concentration involved and, of course, training to get to that point. But…”

Ryouma looked toward the koi pond and outstretched his hand as if reaching for something. After a moment, a river rock flew right into the palm of his hand.

“It happened like that because I wanted it to,” he said, tossing the rock up and down in his hand. “So, what I’m trying to say is that curses are the same as a magic spell to the caster. And it just so happens your special ability is to neutralize magic spells.”

He placed the smooth stone into Midoriko’s hand. Things were clicking into place for her. Did it mean that for all the years she was secretly cleansing curses, it was actually just her ability to neutralize magic?

“I don’t understand, though. Does this mean I’ve gotten rid of her curse?” she asked, rolling the stone between her hands.

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Ryouma said with a sigh. He flopped down onto his back again. “If that were the case, you should have been able to cleanse my curse when you felt up my arm.”

Midoriko clenched the rock, feeling her face flush at that memory.

“No, I think there’s something else needed to break the spell on both Good Girl and me. Some kind of catalyst is needed that was determined by the caster,” he continued. Ryouma stretched and yawned. “For now, I think Good Girl’s ability doesn’t work on you because you can’t be targeted by magic.”

She sat quietly with that thought for a moment. This little girl, who had been used like a weapon, had likely gone her whole short life thus far receiving no love and affection from others. She understood now that her disheveled appearance was due to the fact that there was a limit to how much caretaking Ryouma or Xiǎomíng could provide her with the physical limitations her curse imposed.

Midoriko felt frustrated with herself that she hadn’t realized it sooner. But much like Enishi’s cursed arm, her only sign was a smell that she’d written off as something else. She realized now that Good Girl’s terrible and deadly curse smelled like peaches.

“How old is she?”

“Around seven,” Ryouma replied. Midoriko threw the rock to the ground.

“You can’t neglect her like this! You’re her guardian! Take responsibility for her!” she scolded.

“Geeze, you’re a worse nag than Xiǎomíng,” he groaned. Ryouma rolled to his side, facing away from Midoriko. “She’s fine. Good Girl can dress herself, and she can use the microwave to heat up food I make for her when I’m away.”

“She can barely bathe herself on her own!” Midoriko snapped. She started pummeling Ryouma. “All of her clothes are Xiǎomíng’s hand-me-downs! Her only toys are sticks and rocks! That’s not how a child should live!”

“Ow! Ow!” Ryouma cowered, covering his head. Midoriko knew from experience he could easily dodge or catch her fists, but he allowed himself to be hit. “I get it! I get it!”

She stopped hitting him and stood up. “She may not be related to you by blood, but she sees you as a father. Do better.”

“I will. I swear I will.”

He was hiding his face under the sleeve of his yukata, but Midoriko knew she had shamed him well and good.

***

“You’re going back there?” Midoriko asked as Ryouma and Xiǎomíng were preparing to make a trip to the house in England. “I’ll come too.”

“An arsonist always returns to the scene of the crime,” tutted Ryouma. Midoriko chose to ignore the remark.

“It’s really not necessary for you to join us. We’re just going to assess the damage and collect anything salvageable,” Xiǎomíng stated.

Midoriko bit her lip and rubbed her arm. That was exactly why she wanted to go back. “I feel guilty about it going out of control like that, so I want to help.”

“You can help by not setting this house on fire,” Ryouma chided as he put on his suit jacket. He’d changed from a yukata into a three-piece suit like he always wore during the time spent in England.

“What if the Russians set traps? Like magical booby traps or something because they knew you’d come back. Won’t you need me for that?” Really, what she wanted was to retrieve her phone and wallet if they were still intact.

Xiǎomíng and Ryouma looked at each other as if she’d said something that hadn’t occurred to them.

“Just stick close to us,” Ryouma said with a shrug.

With empty luggage in tow, Enishi Ryouma picked a random door in the huge estate to travel through, but out of all doors…

“Why the door to the toilet?” Midoriko asked, not expecting any real kind of intelligent answer out of the man.

“It opens the same way the door to the study does,” he answered with a shrug. With that, Ryouma knocked on the door twice before opening it to reveal the remnants of the study on the other side.

It had been Midoriko’s second time traveling this way–third if she counted the way in which Ryouma had dragged her to England–and she was still in awe of it. The three of them stepped through the doorway to find themselves on the other side of the world in the blink of an eye.

Though the study had remained largely intact due to Ryouma’s efforts to create a barrier, it still retained some damage. The fire hadn’t broken through the interior walls of the room, but it appeared to have spread to the roof, creating a giant hole over the study where rain drizzled in.

Everything was smoke-damaged and wet. Either by divine intervention or sheer dumb luck, it had rained at some point while the fire raged, dousing the flames.

Ryouma dug through the desk belonging to his alias Royce Westbrook while Xiǎomíng picked up any valuables that were not irreparably damaged.

“Can I check the room I was staying in?” Midoriko asked.

“You’re welcome to try, but I doubt there’s anything left. Just be careful,” Ryouma said, opening and closing drawers.

Midoriko, having seen how the effect worked, closed the door to the study and reopened it. Now, on the other side was the charred remains of the once lovely countryside home. She tread lightly through the hallway, worried she might fall through the damaged floor if she stepped down too hard.

If she wasn’t already aware of the magic Ryouma had used on the study to protect it, she might have thought it was a miracle that it survived. On this side of the door, the house was in much worse condition. The roof was gone on the far end closest to the source of the fire, while the floors and plaster walls were all charred and black.

Did her purse even survive? It was possible. People online always shared odd and random things that managed to survive house fires, so maybe it only got a little singed.

At the top of the stairs, she could see down to the entryway where the chaos of that night ensued. Under some debris, she saw the beige leather strap, now singed and dirty, sticking out.

She couldn’t believe her luck.