The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(29)
“Take my hand,” I said.
Neven crossed the space between us, and his hand fell into mine. I raised my other hand to the sky, and with one swift arc of my arm, extinguished the moon and stars.
Darkness crashed over us. The same color as my hair and eyes, the blackness from before time began, when there was nothing in all directions. I held Neven’s hand tighter when the chill of the stone floor crept up my legs and prickled up my rib cage, a million tiny pinpricks cutting me open.
“Ren,” Neven said, his palm sweaty in mine, his grip growing looser. I had no reassurance except to crush his hand tighter.
Then the stones dissolved and our feet sank into wet sand. I heard the whisper of waves crawling onto shore, the sound of leaves shivering against each other, the wind that hummed from far away.
We saw nothing at all in the endless night, and that could mean only one thing. I gripped Neven’s hand harder.
“We’re here.”
Chapter Seven
Every part of the underworld was speaking.
The hush of leaves in the wind was a thousand formless whispers, both in my ear and a hundred miles away. Ocean waves sighed over our feet and shattered like glass. Even the air resonated with the heavy and faraway hum of a bell toll. The underworld felt alive in a way that the living world never did.
I took a step forward, pressing my foot deep into the sand. Like the water, it had no temperature, just a distant pain, like my foot was falling asleep. Neven must have heard the crunch of sand and thought I was walking away, because his hand snatched my wrist.
“Don’t...” He trailed off, his grip loosening slightly as if he were embarrassed, but not enough to let go of me entirely. “Some light would be nice,” he said, clearly trying hard to sound impatient, even though his voice wavered.
“There’s no source of light that I can manipulate,” I said. “Let’s go find one.”
I took another step and Neven’s hand went tight on my wrist again as he hurried to keep pace with me.
We followed the edge of the water to make sure we didn’t walk in circles, careful never to wade too deep. After a few minutes, the darkness became less oppressive and more familiar, as if I’d always lived in total blackness. Though I could see nothing, I could feel the whole landscape—the plum blossoms and magnolias draped in a canopy over the river, the golden flash of koi fish beneath the water, the distant slope of mountains. Had my senses heightened as a Shinigami, or was the darkness making me hallucinate and paint pictures in my mind? I was trapped in a dreamscape, where everything felt tangible, but if you reached out to touch something or focused too closely on any one detail, the whole picture dissolved. It was more of a feeling than any kind of vision.
With this odd half sight, I led us to a stone lantern by the water’s edge. I laid my hand on it, just to be sure that it really existed, then ignited the flame.
The light formed a pale circle around us, a small shelter from the blackness on all sides. The trees that I’d imagined in the darkness appeared overhead, sickly pale in the dim light. Neven let go of my sleeve and reached out to touch the leaves.
“I forgot what it was like to see for a moment,” he said, running his thumb across the branch. “That’s strange, isn’t it? We were only walking for a few minutes, but I forgot what the world looked like. What I looked like.”
“Strange,” I said, burning the light a little brighter and extending our circle of visibility. Apparently the underworld affected us both in ways I didn’t understand. I knelt down beside the stone lantern and peered through the openings to where a small candle burned, then carefully slid my hand inside and separated the wax from the stone, removing the candle from the lantern and rising to my feet.
“Let’s go,” I said, forcing Neven to follow as I walked away with his only source of light.
The shallow bank of the river expanded, the numbing water rising to our ankles no matter which way we turned. With the light in front of me, I could no longer make out shapes in the darkness the way I’d been able to without light. Were we doomed to wander like this forever? It felt like years had already passed.
Something thin and silky brushed my toes. I looked down, expecting seagrass, but instead saw endless strands of silver swaying back and forth under the clear water. Neven had already stopped and was bending down to run his fingers through the silver thread. It swirled around us, caressing our ankles, as if it knew we were there. Neven pulled some of it above the water, then instantly dropped it and shot to his feet.
“It’s hair,” he said.
I lifted my foot out of the water, pulling up gray strands that turned to a clinging web. What kind of creature had so much hair?
“So it is,” I said, managing to disguise the horror in my voice but unable to keep the disgust off my face.
“This is worse than that spider touching me,” Neven said, grimacing.
We walked for a few more minutes until the hair began to lift out of the river as if someone had pulled it, hanging in dripping knots that gradually rose higher and higher.
Our circle of candlelight inhaled an old woman sitting cross-legged on a small boulder in the river. Her skin was the color of dust, pruned and folded and speckled with age. Her eyes burned a searing gold, her lips pulled back in a smile showing oddly immaculate teeth. Kimonos of a thousand different colors hung from the tree branches behind her, forming an impenetrable wall of fabric.