Eight Million Gods-eARC by Wen Spencer Page A

night. The police report mentions that he has a number of antiques in his apartment, but they didn’t catalog them.”
    “If he was killed for the sword, it’s not going to be there.” He didn’t want to waste more time.
    “Go to Osaka. See if this was the same man and find out if the sword is still at his apartment.”

    The need to write satisfied, Nikki flopped back to lie on the floor.
    Ass-kicking: check. Name-taking: check. Hero? Nikki wasn’t sure. The important thing was she could face the rest of the day feeling somewhat sane.
    She flexed her right hand to work out the cramps, and glanced at her wristwatch. She’d been writing for two hours. Out of habit, she written in tiny little neat letters, sandwiching two rows of sentences between the faint blue lines of the notebook paper.
    She finished her writing ritual by picking a Post-it Note color for the new character. For some reason, he felt like a turquoise. Lacking a name for him, she labeled his Post-it: Scary Cat Dude. She added him to the collage on her apartment wall and shifted the note for Yuuka’s kitten to his story thread.
    That done, she stepped back, looked at the wall, and cringed.
    Her collage of Post-it Notes was one of the few organizational tools that worked for her. Her novels were seemingly random scenes of people struggling with day-to-day lives. She needed this vast tree of notes to understand why any one character was part of her story. In light of Gregory Winston’s murder, though, her story tree looked like something a serial killer would produce.
    There were times Nikki wished she were more in control of her writing. She had thought George was a hero. With each scene, though, he’d drifted more and more toward being a villain. In the end, he’d set the fire to the shrine and killed Yuuka. Heroes did not rape dead teenage girls. After George’s binge in villainy, she hadn’t felt bad about his messy death. It had felt somewhat karmic; he nearly deserved it.
    But Gregory Winston hadn’t.
    Probably.
    The police hadn’t told her anything about Gregory. Nor had they mentioned any other murders in the area. The question remained if her stalker had also killed stand-ins for her dead characters. Had he killed a shrine maiden in Kyoto? Kidnapped a British man? Tortured a pregnant woman?
    She pulled out her laptop and did her best to track down recent murder cases in Japan. As always, she found herself fumbling with the language barrier. Tourism sites were expertly translated, as were top stories of world importance. Gregory’s death had made the news wires as “an American expatriate murdered in Osaka” but the exact details were being kept out of the media. She could find no indication that a teenage girl had been murdered in Kyoto. Yuuka’s body, though, had been hidden away in her novel and found only in the newly written scene. A search for “temple fire” spammed her with hits scattered across the country. Apparently old wooden buildings had a habit of catching fire. “Kyoto,” “temple,” and “arson” got her hits on the Golden Pavilion, but that famous fire had been in the summer of 1950.
    She wasn’t even sure how to track down details matching the other murders she had written. In her scenes, the killings had been in vaguely described locations and the bodies had quietly but mysteriously “disposed.”
    There seemed to be only one way to find out if someone had used her story to plan a murder: go to Gregory’s apartment building. What she posted was fairly vague. The actual polished scene had lots of telling details. If those details matched up, then her psychopath fan had full access to her files.
    She ate the rice balls as she loaded up her backpack with everything she might need. Subway map. Umbrella. Flashlight. Lock picks. The last thing Nikki did as she left her apartment was make sure she wasn’t being followed.

6
    Scene of the Crime

    Nikki always got lost in the Umeda Station as it tangled itself in