The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(26)

I put my clock back in my pocket, and time released its breath. Weak wind flowed down the street again, stirring the dirt around our ankles. The footsteps had stopped.

I took a slow step sideways, off the path, pulling Neven along with me.

“After you,” I said in Japanese to the empty air.

For a moment the street was silent. Even the weak breeze seemed to still, the street static as a photograph. Then the sound of footsteps picked up again from right in front of us and continued down the path, the sound slowly fading as it headed toward the mountains.

“What was that?” Neven said, his voice tightly wound, as if a single wrong word could send him sprinting off again.

“That was Betobeto-san,” I said, pulling Neven back into the street. We had to find the cemetery, especially now that I knew what was after us.

“And what, exactly, is Betobeto-san?”

“He’s a Yokai,” I said, trying my best to sound calm for Neven’s sake while focusing more energy on feeling out the pull of Death. “I thought he was a ghost story, but I guess he’s more like a spirit. He tries to scare travelers until they let him pass.”

“And there are other Yokai?”

I looked down a passing street, delaying my answer. I’d read about many benign Yokai like Betobeto-san, ones that manifested as flat white walls to block your path, or sentient brooms that swept away autumn leaves. But I’d also read about Yokai with hungry jaws on the back of their heads, severed torsos that ran after you on their hands, demon children born from dead leaves and rainwater. If Betobeto-san was real...were all of them real?

“Ren?” Neven said, panic rising in his voice. I didn’t need to answer his question anymore, because my silence had given it away. “Are they dangerous?”

I wanted to reassure him, but I couldn’t lie to Neven.

“Some are, some aren’t,” I said, trying my best to sound flippant. The more important question was, could they kill us? I didn’t know how the power structure worked in Japan among creatures of Death. I doubted that someone as benign as Betobeto-san could kill a Reaper, but was that true of all Yokai?

“All the humans wouldn’t go into hiding just because of Betobeto-san,” Neven said, his voice wavering. “There must be Yokai worse than him out here, right?”

I pulled Neven to a stop.

“We’re Reapers, Neven,” I said, because sometimes Neven needed reminding that he was made not out of flesh and blood but Death and Time. “We don’t need to fear children’s tales. They should fear us.”

“But they’re trying to scare us off, Ren,” Neven said.

A rush of autumn air blew through the street. The complicated plaits of my hair had started to come undone, so I began to tug them out and let my hair down, reveling in how long it had grown since Ivy cut it.

“Let them try,” I said.

I yanked my fingers through the final knot and let my hair blow back in the wind.

We walked in silence until the pull of Death intensified, the distant gravity of a faraway star reaching out to pull us closer.

“It’s this way,” I said, pointing down a street where merchants’ banners hung limp in the streets, sunless flowers of blue and violet inked with brush strokes of kanji.

Neven nodded. “I can feel it, too.”

The sky darkened as we drew closer to the graveyard. Though the horizon still burned red, night had begun to deepen the shadows of the buildings. The distance became blurred with darkness, as if the shore and all its ships were a hazy memory.

Soon, I could see the cemetery’s stone gates at the end of the road, the headstones jutting out of the earth like crooked teeth, the pull magnetizing.

Then a light appeared at the gate.

A young woman stood vigil, a red peony lantern in one hand. Her kimono hung off her thin frame, the fabric the color of storm clouds, embroidered with summer flowers. It was hard to see her face from far away, aside from the glow of the lantern in her eyes.

Neven didn’t slow down, but he took my hand and pressed it to the inside of his elbow, silently asking me not to let go of his arm as we moved forward. The closer we came to the cemetery gates, the more the air around us reeked of Death.

The woman’s gaze tracked us as we came to a stop in front of her, the lantern illuminating her soft, young face. Though she didn’t block the entrance, something about her presence still compelled me not to enter before confronting her. I could safely assume that no one we met at this hour was human, but as long as she kept up a human appearance, I couldn’t gauge how dangerous she was to us.

Rather than speaking, she stared at Neven. It wasn’t the morbid fascination of humans who happened to see the northern lights shifting in his eyes. It wasn’t lust or even curiosity. Instead, her dark eyes read him with a fevered intensity, as if cracking open his skull in her mind and examining the contents. Neven held her gaze, the lights in his eyes spinning faster, flashing blue and violet and emerald and blue again in panic that only I could read.

“Not many are brave enough to come here during omagatoki,” she said.

Neven blinked back at her, uncomprehending.

“So we’ve heard,” I said in Japanese, crossing my arms. “What, exactly, is omagatoki?”

She tore her gaze from Neven, looking at me like she wanted to peel away my skin and count my bones.