The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(31)

“Ren?” Neven said, all annoyance gone from his voice. I heard him shuffle backward in the water. “Ren, is that you?”

“Of course it’s me,” I said, my voice sounding strange even to my own ears, rigid with false anger. I uncurled myself and remembered the approaching light, getting to my feet.

I hit my head against a low-hanging tree branch as I stood up, knocking some kimonos down from the monster’s tree.

“Ren?”

I heard Neven moving closer.

“Stay back for a moment,” I said, swiping my hand through the air to ward off Neven, just in case he was feeling for me in the darkness. I grabbed a wet kimono from the branches and wrapped it around myself. Our next attacker was coming, and I wasn’t about to confront him while naked.

This one, at least, was kind enough to carry his own lantern.

The approaching light revealed a young man running toward us with an uneven gait, the long sleeves of his kimono flapping behind him in shifting shades of blue. The lantern in his left hand illuminated his silver-white skin and dark eyes. Neven squared his stance and tossed me my clock, which I caught with the hand that wasn’t holding my kimono closed.

“Are you all right?” the man said, limping the last few steps toward us. He stopped a careful distance away, seeming to notice our defensive stances, the light from his lantern enclosing the three of us in a dim circle. Beneath the shallow water, his right foot curved inward, his weight resting on the side of his foot rather than the sole.

Perhaps I should just knock him out and steal his lantern to save us all some time, I thought. I’d run out of patience for entertaining Japan’s tricksters.

But then he shifted to his left foot and the lantern light fell over his face.

For the first time in my life, I stared back at another pair of black eyes, filled with all the endless darkness of the underworld.

The notes about Shinigami in the Reaper records had contained absolutely no useful information, other than few soppy notes about how they were “hauntingly beautiful, eyes and hair of endless black, skin that glows like moonbeams.” I hadn’t given the description much weight, because I wasn’t beautiful and my skin certainly didn’t glow. But the man before me looked like the protagonist of an exquisite nightmare, his face as haunting and magnificent as the dead of night.

He loomed over us with his lantern held high, his frame stretched tall and narrow, wrapped in layers of shimmering fabric. His deep blue kimono was embroidered with ocean waves and koi fish in silver thread that glimmered in the lantern light, creating the illusion that the waves churned and the fish leaped across his clothes.

The curse of Death’s presence loomed all around him, in the harsh lines of his jaw and cheeks, the skeletal joints of the hand that held the lantern aloft, the syrupy thickness of his shadow behind him. But something about him transcended the weight of Death in a way I’d never learned how to do myself. His eyes, though dark as all of Yomi, somehow looked more like a night full of stars than a vacuum of nothingness.

“You’re a Shinigami,” I said.

He dropped his gaze to the sand, a faraway sadness softening his features. “By birth, yes,” he said, “but I’m not serving at the moment.”

“Then what is he?” Neven asked me, clearly getting the gist of the conversation with his limited Japanese.

“Right now, just Hiro, a fishing spirit,” the man replied in English. He smiled and turned around, pointing to a basket of fish on his back. “You can have one if you want, but if you eat the food of the underworld, you can never leave.”

I took a few steps closer through the shallow water, unable to look away from him. More than anything, I wanted Hiro to keep talking. His words had a distant ring to them, like the ghost of a note played on the piano when it’s almost faded away.

“A fishing spirit?” I said. “So you controlled the river just then?”

Hiro nodded and turned back around to face me. “Datsue-ba has a habit of trying to skin people before they can cross over. A wonderful way to greet the newly dead, isn’t it? It’s not an issue for everyone, but some people lose their Shinigami guides on the journey down. Don’t worry, she knows I’ll wash away all her kimonos if she tries anything again.”

“So what are you doing here?” Neven said. “Shouldn’t a fishing spirit be up with the living?”

I sighed at Neven’s politely toned bluntness. Neven didn’t seem quite as enamored with Hiro as I was. I didn’t blame him for his suspicion, after everything that had happened to us since setting foot in Japan.

If the question offended Hiro, he didn’t show it. “I have friends here,” he said, shrugging. “And it’s hard to stay away, if this is where you’re from.” Then he turned to me. “You must feel it, too, right? You’re a Shinigami, aren’t you?”

Finally, someone had recognized me without prompting. I held back a smug smile. “Yes,” I said, “but it’s my first time here.”

Hiro hummed. “Well, that’s unusual, but all right. What’s your name?”

“Ren,” I said. “This is my brother, Neven. We’ve come from London.”

Hiro’s eyes widened. “Reapers?”

“You know about Reapers?” Neven said.

Hiro laughed, rippling the still water. “Japan isn’t as closed off as one might think.” Then he turned to me again, his deep eyes drinking me in, his attention unravelling me so quickly that I wanted to melt into the black waters. “So that would make you half Reaper and half Shinigami, I suppose?”