The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(27)

“The hour between day and night when the borders between the realms are thinned,” she said. “When the sky is red, the spirits can come out.”

That explains things, I thought. “Anyway,” I said, “we’re just passing through.”

“One cannot ‘pass through’ this place,” she said.

A spider dropped down from her ear, dangling by its silvery web like an earring. Neven’s lip curled, his arm tense against mine.

“Will you try to stop us?” I said, not bothering to hide the impatience in my voice.

She tilted her head, eyes flickering down to my toes and back up to my face.

“You may enter, if you wish,” she said, “but you will not pass through.”

Another spider crawled across her cheek and crept down the arch of her neck until it came to rest on her collarbone.

Neven stood transfixed, his gaze following the spider with thinly veiled horror.

“What is she?” he said, more to himself than to me.

“An obstacle,” I said.

She turned back to Neven and smiled, her lips cracked with thin black lines.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. But Neven didn’t understand much Japanese, so he said nothing. Another spider crawled out of the girl’s mouth and past her red lips, leaving tiny speckles of red in its path down her chin. Her fingers twitched as she reached out and touched Neven’s face. I would have snapped her wrist off had the motion not been so unnervingly gentle.

“You won’t leave like all the others, will you?” she said. She turned her hand over, caressing his cheek with black nails. Her fingers brushed over his eyelashes and down to his lips.

“Neven?” I said. She hadn’t hypnotized him into stillness, had she?

My voice seemed to snap him out of his trance. His gaze darted to me, then down to the pale hand and black nails on his lips.

“I suggest you remove your hand,” he said, this time using his Reaper voice—polite, because he was Neven, but with an undeniable authority. She wouldn’t notice how he kept his shaking hands in his pockets, close to his clock, just in case.

I didn’t know if she understood, but her hand floated away from his face, leaving clear strings attached to his lips, tethering him to her fingertips. A single spider crawled across the tightrope, inching slowly toward his face. Neven froze, his gaze tracing the strings leading to the girl’s palm, then floating back to the spider’s eight red eyes suspended in front of him.

It took one step closer and all of Neven’s resolve shattered.

He choked out a panicked noise and ripped the strings from his face. They cut like fine glass and lashed blood onto his palm when he cast them to the ground.

The girl frowned and made an odd clicking sound in the back of her throat. I had officially run out of patience.

“Just who do you think we are?” I said, taking a step forward. My words in the language of Death shattered the sacred quiet of the graveyard, the black cherry trees quivering. I hadn’t traveled a year among humans to be toyed with and delayed by an insect.

A burst of spiders scurried down from the girl’s hair at the sound of my voice. She took a step back, her spine stretching taller, her fingers curling into a clawlike shape.

“You dare to raise your voice at me?” she said. “I don’t answer to foreigners.”

“You answer to Death,” I said, my words ripping the dying leaves from their branches.

The woman’s arms stretched past the sleeves of her kimono, her nails sharp as talons.

“Your foreign gods have no place here,” she said, and this time when she spoke, fangs hung over her bottom lip.

Your foreign gods. Even now, she had no idea what I was. The Reapers had looked at me and seen nothing but a Shinigami, but this creature saw only a foreigner. I’d traveled across the world to be respected as a Shinigami, so how dare she tell me that I still didn’t belong?

I would pluck off her limbs like children did with helpless insects, squash her under my heel and scrape her into the dirt. I would destroy her, because we weren’t in England anymore and there was no one to stop me from punishing those who deserved it.

I grabbed her wrist, which grew thinner and oddly hairy in my hand, yanking her lantern to my face. It burned searingly bright, casting the whole cemetery in daylight. The whites of my eyes burned black, light glowing just beneath my skin.

“I’m no foreigner,” I said. I leaned in, my face close to her jeweled eyes, which multiplied until eight yellow orbs blinked at me. “The graves that you’re standing on belong to me.”

She frowned, her gaze shifting between my face and the graves around us. As the black eclipsed the whites of my eyes, her twitching limbs froze like an insect that knew it was cornered, her eyes wide and yellow as she stared into mine.

“Shinigami?” she said.

The lantern light seared through the graveyard like a star explosion, leaving nothing but blackness in its wake. She reared back against my grip, her arm pulling upward as she doubled in height.

The chain of Neven’s clock jingled, his hand touched mine, and everything froze.

I waved my hand toward the crushed lantern and it sparked back to life, casting a flickering yellow haze over the graves. The girl was reared back, her kimono torn open where an extra set of black arms had burst from her middle. Her legs spread wide and black and hairy, fingers merged into claws. Eight eyes decorated her face like tiny yellow pearls.