The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(23)
I would never understand why my father had been the one to take me, when I’d so clearly been unwanted. Nor did I understand how Ambrose, who was about as romantic as a slab of moldy bread, could be seduced by a Shinigami when he knew very well what the consequences would be. But he was far away and would never tell me the answer.
Maybe my mother would, once I found her.
There was always the chance that I wouldn’t find her, but somehow that didn’t feel like my destiny. I’d read so many of the humans’ novels about children with dead parents, loving mothers lost to childbirth or plagues. But I was not a hero with a tragic backstory, I was just a girl nobody wanted. Creatures of Death did not die as easily as humans, so it was far more likely that my mother had simply handed me to Ambrose and sent him away. That had been nearly two hundred years ago—long enough for her to change her mind, or regret, or wonder what might have been.
The first step to finding her was to locate Yomi, the Realm of Perpetual Night.
No Reaper had ever documented a journey to Japan’s underworld, so I’d turned instead to the human books about Japanese legends of Death. After all, the English mythology that the humans believed was at least partially correct—they’d had legends of the Grim Reaper since plague days, and correctly associated him with Chronos, the ancient god of time. It was likely that Japanese mythology would be at least partially based in reality.
The legend that seemed most reasonable to me was that of Yomi, the underworld bathed in darkness. I already knew that Shinigami could control light, so it made sense that they’d been granted that power to adapt to a world of darkness. But even the Shinto myths were strangely cryptic—the only details of the dark underworld I could find were: it was where humans went when their lives ended, and once you ate the food of Yomi, you could never leave. Surely the reality would be more complex than that. Once we made it to Yomi, we could look for other Shinigami to help us.
I wasn’t certain that we could find Yomi from Yokohama, but most of the merchant ships from China had been headed there. If we couldn’t find it on our own, I hoped that we’d at least be able to find some Shinigami after nightfall.
“Where should we go?” Neven said, his gaze tracing the path of a brown pheasant with its wings stretched across the white sky.
“Let’s find a graveyard and start from there.” After all, we were looking for the land of the dead. It made sense to follow Death’s pull to its most concentrated place.
We stepped onto more level ground, past the wet slope of the shore and beyond a row of burnt red maple trees guarding the town. As I passed the barrier of the tree line and brushed a stray branch from my face, all the crimson leaves withered to crisp black and a sudden wind ripped them all from the branches, showering us in dead leaves.
Neven sputtered at the leaves in his eyes and hair, but didn’t seem to notice how suddenly they’d died. I thought back to the rose I’d killed on the ferry to France. Once was strange, twice was a pattern. Cromwell had promised that Death would find me, and now it was spreading from my fingertips. But if the only consequence was a few dead plants, I wasn’t going to agonize over it. Perhaps whatever curse he’d cast had been unable to follow me to the other side of the world and would grow weaker over time.
“Ren?” Neven said, pausing when he realized I’d stopped walking. “Are you all right?”
I brushed the leaves from my coat. “Yes,” I said, looking away. I wouldn’t worry Neven over something I didn’t fully understand. He had enough to worry about as it was. “Let’s go.”
A few fishermen carrying their boat to the sand stopped and stared as we walked past them. I’d expected as much, considering that we were wearing British clothes and not kimonos, like everyone else.
A group of women walked by, holding up umbrellas even though it wasn’t raining. They wore kimonos patterned with pinstripes and cotton flowers, their hair pinned back in the same loose but elegant bun that I had no idea how to imitate. They said something in Japanese that I didn’t quite understand, and I suddenly wished that I’d studied more.
As we drew closer to the town, the crowd began to thicken. I pressed closer to Neven, jumping when a woman brushed the fabric of my skirts.
Men pulling people on two-wheeled carts cut through the crowd, one nearly crushing my toes. To stay out of the way, we moved to the edge of the path, elevated from the shallow water a few feet below. All around us, fishermen hauled their massive nets through the crowd, women knelt before their looms and wove red fabric, and children ran through the streets with their wooden sandals thwacking against the dirt.
I stopped at the intersection of what seemed to be the main road, store wares spilling onto the street. Old women advertised their silk hanging from clotheslines and waving in the breeze, scarlet red with gold flowers, pale peach with embroidered emerald cranes. Others held ceramic plates painted with the purple silhouette of the distant mountains. More of the two-wheeled carts rolled down the street carrying crates, and children ran around with damp and sand-caked feet. The air smelled of ocean and smoked fish.
It felt like a home. Not my home, but a place that could be home to someone. London had felt like a place to live, but not a place that could ever be home.
A child barreled toward us, screaming and laughing. Neven took a step back to get out of his way and nearly slipped off the path and into the water. I grabbed his shirt to keep him from falling, and we teetered on the edge for a moment before we both tipped the other way and fell into the dirt road. The people shuffling past us stared and whispered in Japanese, giving us a wide berth.