The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(28)

“Jorogumo,” I whispered, circling around her and running my fingers across her new limbs. “Spider woman.” Another Yokai, more troublesome than the previous one, since this one had an appetite for young men. In the book of Yokai that I’d read as a child, she’d been taller than a building. But I supposed that the book had valued entertainment more than accuracy.

“She’s horrifying,” Neven said, stepping slightly behind me. He shook the webs from his fingers, the clock in his other hand glinting in the dim light.

“She didn’t hurt you, did she?” I said, grabbing Neven’s jaw and turning his head to the side where she’d touched him. “Was she venomous?”

“I’m fine,” he said, setting a gentle hand on my wrist.

That matter settled, I turned back to the Jorogumo, grabbing her by her long black hair and yanking hard. The time freeze had stiffened her body, but eventually I cranked her head down to my level. I pulled the switchblade from the band at my skirt, but just as I moved toward her throat, Neven caught my wrist.

“Ren,” he said quietly, his eyes a weak blue.

“She attacked us,” I said, even though we both knew that wasn’t the reason.

“Ren.”

I looked down at my hand, tangled in her hair, her glassy black eyes still staring straight ahead.

Your foreign gods have no place here.

Her words spun endlessly in my head. How dare she look at me and call me a foreigner. I looked like a Shinigami—that was what I’d been told since I was old enough to retain memories. Go back to Japan and play with your Shinigami friends, Ren. Feed yourself to the faerie dogs, Ren, because dying would be the only thing you’re good for. Just let your brother reap your soul so he can live without shame.

I yanked my wrist from Neven’s grip and slit her throat.

For one single moment as I released her, I saw a flash of white inside my hand, as if my skin had turned translucent and revealed my bare bones wrapped in ribbons of red veins. But when I blinked, the hand was the same as it had always been, and still clean, because the blood wouldn’t fall until time restarted.

I kept staring at my left hand as Neven let go of me. Reapers did not have impeccable vision, so perhaps it had been a trick of light.

I didn’t look at my brother as I put my knife away, then picked up the Jorogumo’s lantern and followed the pull across the graveyard, Neven a few paces behind me.

We followed a dirt path to a torii gate made of weathered stone. As we passed through, the night fell silent. Beyond the gate, an open-air structure with a sloped roof awaited us at the end of the path. White flags with emerald circles hung around the half walls, unmoving in the quiet night.

The strength of Death’s pull had my feet moving faster and faster until it dropped me at the stairs of the building.

“Is it a grave?” Neven said from behind me.

I shook my head. “It’s a shrine.”

My hands brushed dirt from the stone platform, revealing the kanji carved into it.

“Izanami,” I whispered, my fingers dusting over her name.

“Izanami?”

I nodded, rising slowly to my feet. “The Goddess of Death,” I said. “She created all the islands of Japan.”

“She sounds more like a goddess of creation,” Neven said.

I shook my head, toeing my shoes off and abandoning them on the stairs. “She died giving birth to the god of fire and fell into the underworld.”

I could feel her presence around the shrine, the same way that I could feel Ankou back in England—a sense that someone was there, watching you in the trees and grass and stars. But unlike Ankou, this felt less like I was being hunted and more like I was coming home, no longer alone in a new country. Perhaps I could ask Izanami where my mother was, rather than searching through all of Yomi for a face I’d never seen.

Neven took his shoes off and followed me onto the stone platform. The shrine was empty inside, letting the night pass through it. The coldness of the stone floor numbed my bare feet and sent pinpricks up my legs.

“Her husband, Izanagi, went down to bring her back to Earth,” I said, circling the perimeter and running my hands across the smooth wood banister, “but when he held a torch to her face, he saw that her flesh had been eaten by maggots, and she was no longer beautiful, so he ran away from her.”

I finished my circuit of the room and knelt down, feeling along the stone tiles. “She chased him and said that if he didn’t come back, she would take one thousand of the living to join her in the darkness every day. And guess what he did?”

Neven watched me, still standing in his socks near the entrance. “He left her,” he said quietly.

I nodded. “She must be in charge of the Shinigami, like Ankou is in charge of us. She must know where my mother is.”

My hands stilled. I’d felt all the stone tiles but found no give, nothing that might be a passage to another world. Death had pulled us to her door, but wouldn’t open it for us.

“Can I help?” Neven said.

I shook my head. “I just need to think.”

He nodded and leaned back against the doorway. When he turned, the moonlight fell across half his face, casting it in cadaverous gray.

I stood up and moved to the half wall, sticking my head outside. Dying leaves shrouded the graveyard from the rest of the town, so the only light that reached the shrine came from the thin slice of moon and faraway stars. But that was probably too much light, since we were looking for the Land of Eternal Darkness.