The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(22)

“You don’t have to come,” I said, dropping my gaze to the wet floorboards. “You can stay in France and be a student, like you wanted. I’ll come back and visit in a few years—”

“Stop saying that.”

I looked up. Neven was frowning, slipping his dirty glasses back on.

“Stop saying what?”

He glared at me through fogged lenses. “Stop acting as if I’d want to be anywhere without you.”

Once again I thought of a thousand ways I should have talked him out of it. I should have told him that living among the humans in France would be far different from living among the Shinigami in Japan, where everyone would know at first glance that he didn’t belong. I should have told him that all the books I’d read about Japan were old and likely inaccurate, that I truly had no idea what monsters waited in the Japanese underworld.

But then I thought about swimming through the loneliness of the dark ocean all alone, and how, without Neven, I would be Wren and not Ren. In the end, I didn’t try to stop him.

He tipped his head back against the wall, dampening the curled lilies of the wallpaper.

“Well,” he said, a faint smile curling the corner of his mouth, “I guess you’ll have to start teaching me Japanese again.”



Chapter Five


I stepped onto the shores of Yokohama and took a deep breath of the October air. It had been nearly nine months between the different legs of the journey—around Spain and Portugal, through the Strait of Gibraltar and then Indonesia, boarding a different ship on the coast of China, and finally arriving at the port of Yokohama, Japan.

Throughout the journey I’d stayed mostly hidden in our cabin, wary of any Reapers that might be searching for me, but Neven had ventured outside. He’d talked to the humans, coming back every few hours to bring me stolen trinkets or books in different languages, some I’d never seen before. He told me stories like he had when we were kids, this time claiming he’d met a female pirate with one eye, and the founder of a ginger candy company who gave him samples that tasted like spices and dust.

It wasn’t until six months had passed without event that I’d felt certain the Reapers had given up hope of finding me, perhaps deciding I wasn’t worth the effort and resources. I started venturing out to the upper docks with Neven, and though I had little interest in making human friends, as Neven seemed inclined to do, I heard languages that I’d only ever seen on paper, saw people who didn’t wear corsets or elaborate hats, and smelled spices that I hadn’t known existed. Of course I had always known that the world was vast, but until then, everything but London had seemed like a fairy tale. Every time I went to sleep, I was sure I would wake up again in the catacombs, ripped away from this new dream.

The months spun by in a blur of sunrises and sunsets and endless ocean from behind the fingerprinted glass of my cabin window. While it was one of the duller periods of my existence, in a lifetime of two millennia, a year lasted no more than a breath, and this time was inconsequential. For a while, as I floated farther and farther away from Ivy and Ambrose and the dark winter of London, the quiet hours spent alone had felt meditative and necessary. But the closer we came to Japan, the more I lay awake at night, my stomach twisting. Neven blamed it on seasickness, but I knew he was wrong because I felt the sensation down in my bones. For over a century I’d dreamed of reaching Japan, and in a few short weeks, I would see it not through the lens of a camera or a painter’s reproduction but with my own eyes.

When the final ship in our journey docked in Yokohama and we emerged from the cramped cabin onto the shores of Japan, I clung to Neven’s sleeve, afraid that I would wake up if I didn’t keep myself tethered.

We’d arrived in the early stages of autumn, when leaves had started to crisp at the tips and the whole world looked like it was dying. While London was made of stone and brick, Japan was made of wood—every house wore panels of unpainted cypress and pine as armor, the bare wooden buildings like skeletons of houses long forgotten. Closer to the port, spidery wooden legs elevated the coastal homes above the shore. I imagined the houses crawling away into the sea and drowning all the humans inside.

In another world, this could have been my home. I might have grown up running barefoot on the shore instead of on rain-slick cobblestones. Maybe home would have meant the smell of brine and sight of merchant ships on the horizon, rather than the taste of burnt coal dust in the air and rainclouds over stone steeples.

Everything I saw was a story that had been stolen from me. The ships that shifted sleepily in the glassy port waters, the footprints in the fine dirt roads, the perfect pale white shade of the sky—all of it should have been mine. I shouldn’t have returned to Japan with the eyes of a tourist but of a native. I would never truly be native to anywhere in the world, because my father had stolen this world from me and shoved me into another one.

I understood so little about my origins, but I was reasonably certain that I’d been born in Japan and not England. Whenever I’d asked Ambrose about it, he’d always murmured something vague before suddenly needing to leave on Council business. The only thing he’d ever truly confirmed was that my mother was Japanese, and she was not in England.

In response to his silence, I’d liberated some library books and read that around the time I was born, the shogun had closed off Japan from the rest of the world. The Japanese couldn’t leave, so neither could the Shinigami. But the Japanese had still traded with the Dutch, and it would have been feasible for Ambrose to sail to the Netherlands and then Japan. It was far less likely that my mother had fled Japan and then returned for punishment.