Natsumi declared victory over a tray of convenience-store pastries like she'd conquered a small nation.

I paid, because that is apparently my role in the economy of Shin'yume now: emotional support and snack funding.

She smiled at me with syrup on one cheek and the kind of cat-grin that meant she had already lost three more personal battles and won all of them.

Konbini snaks and Ramune bottles in hand, we walked up the hill toward Shin'yume-sou in that crooked line you get when a trio is both lazy and purposeful.

The sky had that flat gray that made everything look like it belonged in an old VHS tape, and the air smelled of warm trash and something faintly floral that could have been either a dying plant or a bad perfume.

Natsumi hummed. Inego adjusted his glasses and pretended the world wasn't subtly falling apart in a charming neon sort of way, and for a couple of minutes, my shoulders relaxed and I smiled, enjoying the soft scent of blooming sakura trees mixed among the dead forest.

Then, I rememberd something from earlier, and I asked out loud what I'd been carrying since the tanuki called me "pops."

"Why would Daigo call me 'pops'? That's kinda… weird, right?"

Natsumi chewed, thinking.

"Natsumi says Amerikajin is sounding like a broken record. Maybe he saw future. Maybe he saw you with a cane and slippers and a lifelong regret about not learning the piano. Or maybe he just thinks you have a good face for fatherhood."

She gave me a look that could have been sympathy if it weren't mostly amusement.

Inego snorted.

"Daigo runs an illegal vape shop in the boys' bathroom by the auxiliary gym," Natsumi said, like she was announcing the weather.

She said it with absolute, terrible certainty.

Inego blinked.

"How do you know that if it's literally in the boy's bathroom?"

Natsumi's grin widened in a way that made the top of her lip split into a little feline smile.

She looked at Inego like someone had given her a secret map and a stick of gum.

"Natsumi goes where Natsumi wants to go… and Natsumi went on an adventure in the boy's room. Maybe… British boy will find out some day."

She glanced at me, then at Inego, and for a second there was a silly little spark in her eye that read, maybe, this would be fun.

She leaned toward Inego conspiratorially.

"Maybe British boy would like Natsumi to come into the boys' bathroom with him, desu ne?"

Inego's face drained an uncomfortable, polite white.

"Natsumi can turn British boy into British man."

The mental image that popped into Inego's head was apparently very funny and very confusing to him.

If faces could squeal, his would have.

I couldn't help a laugh that was half protection and half sympathy.

"Stop terrorizing him, Natsumi," I muttered, because someone had to.

I was trying.

She didn't stop.

Instead she wound one of her long twin cat tails, around my wrist and the other around Inego's.

It was quick and precise, like a cat choosing paws.

One tail tugged and left a faint, ridiculous warmth on my skin.

The other did the same to Inego.

Natsumi's voice dropped into a soft, almost conspiratorial purr, but it sounded off, and grating against my ears.

"Natsumi thinks Amerikajin and British boy are cute, and she doesn't mind. Yukai are different. Do things… differently."

She grinned, her eyes flashing like a cats.

"Natsumi can show you things humans find… different. Amerikajin and British boy like. Natsumi shows."

She purred again, walking between the two of us with her twin tails twitching as they were wrapped around mine and Inego's wrists.

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I felt the air tilt.

There was something in the touch that was deliberately personal, like a bookmark placed in a private book.

I tried to squirm out of it, but Natsumi tightened around our wrists in a slow, casual way that said, no, stay, this is funny.

I went uncomfortable, fast and sharp, the way you do when someone takes one of your jokes and folds it into something more honest than you wanted to share.

Natsumi read that, then laughed.

The laugh smoothed the edge off the awkwardness like a hand wiping fog off a window.

Then she stuck her tongue out at the two of us.

"It's easy to make human boys flustered," she said, the laugh in her mouth like a secret.

"Natsumi thinks humans are kawaii. So easy."

Inego forced a laugh that sounded like a hacky old chair. "I suppose that explains why nekomata get a weird wrap in folklore," he said, trying to be light but also approving of the chaos.

He was smiling now, because that's what you do when the absurdity settles into a comfy chair and makes itself at home.

Natsumi shrugged, totally unconcerned with scholarly accuracy.

"Folklore is boring. Natsumi doesn't care. But Natsumi is glad she has more friends."

She looked from me to Inego, her strange smile never leaving her face.

"Because Natsumi has friends, Natsumi has advice for them. Don't trust zombie Skuzz."

She went all business then, stamping the warning into our brains like a cog in a machine.

"Most zombies stare, mumble to themselves, maybe eat brains. Natsumi never known a zombie to cook up plans. That one's weird. Dangerous weird."

We walked in a little silence after that, the kind of easy silence where you can hear your shoes and the city breathing.

Shin'yume-sou's gate came into view, the metalwork half-gnarled, half-charm, the way everything there was both held together and falling apart on purpose.

"Natsumi's going to get high," she announced as if that was her ultimate destination.

She gave the gate a little salute and scuttled off like she owned the breezeway.

Which, honestly, she did.

Inego and I kept walking toward our room.

"Practice," he said. "We should get some guitar time in. I need to polish that weird chord progression you stubbornly refuse to let me change."

I shrugged.

It wasn't my fault if he had a tin ear and sucked at writing chords down.

We climbed the stair and ducked into my room.

One of Yuki's borrowed hairpins glittered like frost on the windowsill, and it reminded me that she was with Azuki getting ready for the dance.

The room smelled like incense and old books, a little like the inside of some thought you can't quite remember having, and sandalwood incense.

I set my bag down and reached to the corner where my guitar lived, half-expecting it to be the size of a banjo and strangely patient.

Inego did something ridiculous and normal at once.

He pinched the air where a guitar should not have been and pulled. A compact object sprang from his pocket and stretched, wood like folded paper, string uncoiling into tension, until a full-size guitar rested in his hands as if it had always lived there.

He smiled with the smugness of a conjurer who knows he'll never be suspected of cheating at cards.

I pulled my own instrument free from the corner case where it had been leaning like a tired stranger.

Its strap hung heavy and black, the leather braided and cold, studded with tiny scales that caught the room's light like small, malevolent moons.

A black dragon was stitched into the strap in shadow-thread, claws and coil and a mouth that looked like it might hiss at you for touching it, and I remembered the night that Murasaki had given it to me.

Inego's mouth tightened as soon as he saw it.

He let his eyes travel across the strap, slow and deliberate, like a man reading a small, unpleasant headline.

"Oi, mate. Where'd you get that?"

I felt my shoulders tense, because this was something I'd been worried about.

"It was a gift from… Murasaki," I said.

He didn't press immediately.

Instead he brought the guitar closer and inhaled like someone taking the invisible temperature of a room.

His face changed, then, tight, suspicious, a private alarm going off.

"There's something on it," he said finally, flat and dangerous. "It's… a scent."

Damn.

I didn't need a wizard to explain that wasn't good.

"Probably gas station cologne," I joked, because jokes are scaffolding and scaffolding is necessary when you are standing next to an old thing you'd rather not name.

Inego's eyes narrowed to proper slits.

"You know it's Murasaki, yank. You're not that dumb."

The name fell between us like a dropped coin.

The strap's dragon seemed suddenly less like an accessory and more like a sigil.

I felt it, the tiny hairs on the back of my neck leaning like reeds in a wind.

"Lemon... ginger?" Inego said, tasting the idea in the air like someone evaluating an herb.

"Lemon and ginger and something like warm metal," I said.

He nodded.

"She marks things, Ryu. That's what she does. She leaves her scent on things like an artist signing a canvas, and she does it because it brings you closer to her."

The room felt suddenly smaller.

My stomach rearranged itself into a place I'd rather it not be.

"Marked?"

He sighed.

"Marked." Inego's voice was a blunt instrument now. "It's not just a smell. It's a claim. She marks people, places, objects. It's subtle, but it's there. Murasaki's scent lingers like lacquer."

I looked at the strap again, at the dragon stitched in shadow-thread, and something in me recoiled and leaned at once.

It made sense on the level of nightmares and myths and the kind of terrible logic that fits yokai, succubi leaving marks because affection and ownership are the same language to them.

I thought of Murasaki's laugh, a sound that could be honey and brimstone at once.

I thought of the way she'd handed me the strap with a careless smile and a flicker of something I could not read at the time.

"You smell it too?" I asked, because I needed to know I wasn't alone on the cliff-edge.

Inego nodded.

"It's a bit late not to accept it, and she'll know if you get rid of it. So, unless you want a pissed off succubus gunning for you, you're stuck with it."

He pinched the bridge of his nose as though he were explaining this to a child.

"Don't sleep with it near your head."

He sounded wary in a way I respected but did not appreciate.

The afternoon light outside the window scraped like a fingernail.

Somewhere upstairs Natsumi was probably already three kinds of spaced out and offering metaphysical advice to pigeons.

Outside, the onsen steamed.

In my hands, the black dragon strap was cool and dangerous and impossibly, quietly alive.

"Marked," I repeated, the word heavy and weirdly inevitable.

Inego's eyes found mine and held them like a question.

"Be careful, mate. Succubi don't do casual dating."

I wanted to argue.

I wanted to say it was just a strap, just a scent, just a joke we'd laugh about later.

Instead I imagined Natsumi's tail wrapping around my wrist and set the guitar in my lap like I was cradling something sacred and dangerous both.

We listened to the wind push the paper lanterns and made them whisper.

Inside, my dragon strap curled around my shoulder as though it were waiting.

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