Year of the Demon Read Online Free PDF Page B

first she thought it might have been a pop culture thing—growing up overseas, she’d missed out on a lot of her generation’s icons—but Han hadn’t recognized it either. That made her think the mask must have been somewhere in Yamada-sensei’s many scribblings.
    She had hundreds of his notebooks, stacked in tightly packed banker’s boxes along the far wall of her tiny bedroom. She had no space for them, but neither could she bear to part with them. She liked coming home to him, even if all she had left of him was his old notes and his sword. Glorious Victory Unsought, the final masterpiece of Master Inazuma, rested in the sword rack she’d installed over her bed. It was enormous, a horseman’s weapon, and it threatened to pull out the mounting screws with its weight. That in and of itself might have been tempting fate’s sense of irony—in a land of earthquakes, a swordswoman was unwise to sleep directly under her weapon—but the sword was so long that this was the only wall it would fit on.
    She was skimming tonight, not reading, and she worked her way through five volumes in the time it took her to finish her dinner. It was on the last page of the last notebook that she found what she was looking for.
    The demon mask stared back at her. Its long, curving fangs were sharper than its stubby horns, its face wrought in a permanent grimace. It had a sharp row of incisors but no lower jaw, as it covered only the top half of the face, like something one might wear to a masquerade ball.
    Yamada-sensei must have sketched it when he was younger, before he lost his vision. He’d surrounded it with notes, including guesses at its weight and size, and also the names of some historical figures attached to it. Mariko only recognized one of the names: Hideyoshi, one of the San Eiketsu , the Three Unifiers. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga, and Tokugawa Ieyasu were the founding fathers of her country, three great warlords who united dozens of warring fiefdoms and turned them into one pacified empire. If not for them, there would be no Japan.
    A thrill of adrenaline clenched Mariko’s stomach and froze her breath in her lungs. It was the same feeling she would expect after narrowly missing what should have been a fatal car crash. Not two hours ago, she’d raided that packing plant with a small army of cops. What if the Kamaguchis had initiated a firefight? Both sides had automatic weapons. This was the kind of artifact that Indiana Jones would risk his life to recover, and one stray bullet could have destroyed it forever.
    It was uncanny that she should own the only notebook with a sketch of this mask and that she just so happened to be in the same room with the mask. Not so long ago, she would have called it a spooky coincidence, but this was Yamada’s notebook, and her time with him had been weird enough that she’d stopped using the word coincidence when it came to him.
    Of course it was possible that Yamada’s mask had nothing to do with the mask she’d seen tonight. More than possible, in fact. Probable. Almost certain. There were thousands of masks in Japanese history, tens of thousands, and as a historian and a lover of medieval artifacts, Yamada would have had an interest in any number of them. But his particular speciality—his raison d’être, in fact—was studying the artifacts that no one else dared to study lest they be accused of believing in magic. Mariko wasn’t ready to believe in magic, but she did believe in fate. Her experience with Yamada left her no other choice. And that meant she had to admit the possibility that she and the mask were fated to cross paths.
    A strange catharsis settled over her. She’d satisfied her curiosity about the mask. She’d reinforced her faith in her own powers of recollection, association, and deduction—never a bad thing for the only female detective in a department run by chauvinism and prejudice. And she’d forged a new connection with her departed sensei. She