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“Have at it. I’ve got nothing to hide back there except my dentures case.”
I skirted the counter and walked through the open doorway that led to the employee-only space. The fridge was so small that the sheet of paper nearly blocked my view of it.
Kelsey was a talented artist. The baku looked exactly like the one in my dream. The drawing showed the creature standing face-to-face with a unicorn in front of a rainbow.
I returned to Jessie with the drawing in hand. “This is very good. How old is Kelsey?”
“Ten.”
“Did she seem well when she was here, or do you think she just wanted to get out of school?”
“She seemed more tired than usual. Other than that, I think she was fine. I imagine she was up late the night before and was paying the price for it. Her parents aren’t the best when it comes to a strict schedule. I told them she couldn’t come back today if she decides to stay home again because I’m going to visit my friend Harriet.” The wrinkles of Jessie’s pruned face tightened. “Harriet slipped into a coma the other night. She’d been unwell, but we didn’t realize how bad it was until then.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Does she live in Fairhaven?”
“Yes, she’s in one of the townhouses. She has a home health aide coming to check on her, and her son and daughter-in-law have moved in temporarily. They were going to take her to a hospital, but she has a living will that limits her treatment. If she doesn’t wake up soon, that’s it for poor Harriet.” Jessie sounded vaguely fatigued by the notion, like she’d attended more than her share of funerals.
“I hope she wakes up soon then.”
Worry gnawed at me as the pressure began to build. I had to find a way to rouse these women from their unintended slumbers. I also didn’t want young Kelsey or anyone else to suffer the same fate as Renee, Cam, and Harriet. The only way to protect them was to find the baku and kill it before it caused any further damage to people. I wasn’t sure how many baku visits it took to trigger a coma, nor did I know how many Kelsey had already experienced.
“Now that I think about it, I’ve got a small Japanese mythology section.” Jessie pointed to my left. “One stack over. Far right. Middle shelf.”
“Do you have this whole place memorized?”
Her thin lips stretched into a smile. “Only the books that haven’t been moved in twenty years.”
I followed her instructions and located the section easily. I dusted off the fattest book I could find and flipped to the index. Bingo.
I skimmed the contents of the page. Some of the information was as I remembered—the baku devours dreams and nightmares. According to Japanese legend, the supernatural beings were created by the gods using the leftover pieces of other animals. Those gods must’ve had a lot of leftover tapir and anteater pieces, although this book suggested a baku consisted of an elephant’s trunk, an ox’s tail, and tiger paws. The book had to have been written by humans who’d never actually seen one. It happened a lot. I only hoped the rest of their information was accurate because I was relying on it to save lives.
The more I read, the more confused I was. A baku should only come when summoned, traditionally by children for protection against nightmares. They’d place a talisman by their bedside to call to a baku for help. The only warning was not to become overly reliant on the creature because it might eat more than the nightmare if it was still hungry afterward.
For whatever reason, the Fairhaven baku was on a bender.
I closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. Killing the baku appeared to be the only way to defeat it, which seemed a shame. There had to be a good reason this baku was eating its way through the residents of Fairhaven to the point where some of them had become comatose, and I began to worry I knew what that good reason was. If the baku was used as protection from nightmares, then it was also meant to protect people from me. What if neither Officer Leo nor Naomi Smith were to blame for the baku’s presence?
What if the responsible party was me?
CHAPTER17
Iset my concerns aside and focused on rooting out the baku to defeat it before it harmed anyone else. I left the bookshop and drove straight home to think. Seated at my kitchen table, I updated West on the new information without mentioning my presence as the potential trigger. West had already made it clear he didn’t want me here if my presence endangered the town. If he knew about my connection to the baku, the alpha wouldn’t hesitate to run me out of Fairhaven.
“Sounds like you’ve had a breakthrough,” Ray said, appearing by the fridge.
I nodded. “I need a talisman to summon the baku.”
“What kind of talisman?” Ray asked.
“It’s specific to a baku. Japanese children would put it next to their beds to summon the creature and have it devour their bad dreams.”
“It seems to be eating what it wants without the talisman,” Ray said. “What good will it do now?”
“It’ll summon the baku to the place I want it.”
His eyebrows crept up to his hairline. “I see. And then you’ll kill it?” He hesitated. “How do you kill something that isn’t real?”
“Oh, it’s real. It just exists in another plane. That’s how it gets inside everyone’s heads without breaking into their houses first.”
