Nothing But Blackened Teeth(20)

“I’m staying out of this.”

I gave Phillip a look, hoping he’d get what I was trying to telegraph: let him have this. Maybe we might get lucky. Maybe all the yokai wanted was for us to panic, kick around a few old books, cry, then they’d let us out with Talia a little worse for wear. Either way, I wasn’t going to correct Faiz. Not now with the Sword of Damocles metronoming over our heads, shaving the moments into halves, into quarters, into an infinitely replicating prism of drawn-out pauses, underscored with a war chant of: this was a fucking mistake. If Faiz was right, if the myths were true, Talia lay buried with every dead girl to have been entombed in this place. How many minutes and how many hours before she suffocated on soil?

Phillip laved his tongue over his mouth, licking the sweat from his upper lip, and tried to smile even though it made him look like a goldfish drowning on dry air.

I grimaced and tried not to stare at the walls.

“A bit of organ.” Faiz had aged sixty years in six hours. Not literally. Although you’d think he had, if all you saw were his mirror image in the fusuma. The house had made a twin of Faiz in its walls, aged that calligraphed version of him into some kind of hairless Chow Chow, thick-faced and jowly, sad eyes downturned in a face wadded like dough. Who knew that dead feudal lords could be so petty? “I’ll do it.”

“What?” I shot my head up.

“I’ll do it,” he repeated, even as his gold-leafed doppelg?nger creased and crinkled, the paper ripping into a train of mouths. I could smell out-of-season zelkova and frangipani, spider lilies the color of arteries, incense and grave dirt, the odour so thick you could knot it into a noose. “Life doesn’t have any meaning without her, anyway. I can’t—I don’t want to go on in a world without her. I’ll do it. I’ll cut out my heart. I’ll—”

I slapped him. “What the fuck?”

It was a good slap. More of an open-palm hook, his jaw crunching where the joint met the heel of my hand. The blow rattled through both of us so hard that it made me bite my tongue. Blood dripped warm down the eave of my scowl, dotting the now-rotten tatami with red. A breeze billowed past us, a stench too: cardamom and mildew and menstrual flow. Around us, the yokai in the murals jeered and snickered in Chaplinesque quiet: ink-stroke tanuki and painted tengu, kitsune drawn with six strokes of a master’s brush, a two-dimensional heron gorgeted in carnelian, the color so bright you’d think someone had slit its throat.

“You’re not cutting your fucking heart out. What the fucking fuck do you think this is? A fucking Shakespeare tragedy or some fucking shit like this? We’re not fucking letting you—”

Faiz never got angry. Except when he did. He roared up like a bear, like someone who’d run out of reasons to keep breathing, fists balled around the loss of his bride-to-be, his almost-wife. I squared my feet and jutted my chin. Faiz was tall when he wasn’t slouched over, six feet even on the rise of his toes, quarterback shoulders. He could have been a somebody but all he ever wanted to be was somebody to someone, a husband, a family man, a dream he’d coddled since he was ten.

“The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” Like hell I was going to stand down for an ego swollen as an alcoholic’s liver, bruised black, bleeding warm pus and grief. Mourning’s got a way of making men out of mice, I tell you. I shoved him and he leaned hard into the push, one arm brought up over his head.

“Whoa, guys—” Wonderboy Phillip, glossy as the cover of Forbes, hundred-dollar clean fade and a jawline to slice open your heart, slid between us. You could always count on Phillip to save the day. Forget the initial argument. He had room to play hero.

“Fuck off.” I stomped a heel into his calf, a thumb’s length south of the back of his knee, snarling as I spun away. Phillip slung me a wounded-dog look, the candle-glow picking out the gold in his hair. In the next room, a perfect black silhouette on white rice paper, kanemizu on ivory, the ohaguro-bettari sat and laughed like someone’d told her the joke that killed God.





8



Don’t touch me,” said Faiz.

“Jesus. We’re all friends here, man.” Phillip held his palms up, guiltless as a madonna, features twitching through the permutations of a smile. He had lost the trick of the expression, somehow, somewhere between arrival and the time that Faiz wrenched out his own tooth, a strand of red nerve whipping through the half-gold light.

We could be dead.

You’d think it’d be harder. But if you’re desperate enough, you can shovel under the gum with your nails, digging out sickle-moons of bleeding pink flesh until the bicuspid loosens, pre-slickened with blood, and you can anchor a grip around the root and pull. At least we’d kept him from cutting out his heart. At least there was that. Faiz had fucked his own hand raw, trying to eke out a little bit of spunk to drip into the floorboards. But it could have been worse.

“If you were my friend, you’d let me die—”

He pushed and Phillip did not yield, a summer romance with the runway separating the two, Phillip’s post-collegiate musculature longer, leaner, still built to be loved by the light. Next to the other man, Faiz looked old, tired, middle-aged before his season. “Are you listening to yourself? Do you have any idea how melodramatic you sound?”