The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(49)

“I suggest you carry your shoes, unless you want to arrive upstairs barefoot,” he said.

We copied Hiro and entered the shrine. White candles lined the perimeter, nothing but night air covering the tiled floor. Though it had no true walls, the shrine muted the sounds of wind and shifting grass and running water, as if we’d traveled somewhere far away. Hiro began to light the candles with a wave of his hand but hesitated after lighting only the far wall.

“Actually,” he said, “this is your mission, Ren of London. Why don’t you do the honors?”

“All right,” I said, though I found the idea of carrying three people across worlds much more daunting with Hiro as an audience rather than Neven alone. Not to mention that I wasn’t entirely sure how to bring us back to the land of the living.

I turned to the few flickering candles that Hiro had lit. Clearly the answer had something to do with them. We’d descended to Yomi standing in a shrine of total darkness, so maybe the way out was exactly the opposite.

I lit the rest of the candles with a single gesture, casting a golden glow over the stone floor. Then I held out my hands, Neven and Hiro each taking one, the left cold and the right warm.

“Close your eyes,” I said.

But I left mine open for a moment longer as the lanterns grew brighter, blending into a star-white cloud of light. The glow of the candles stretched outward, their circles expanding and breathing in all the shadows. For once, light cast the shores of Yomi in broad daylight, the sand white as powdered bones.

All the light began to sting my eyes, so I let them fall closed, let the light in my blood soak up the darkness around me. A warmth spread through the soles of my feet on the stone floor, blooming up my legs and spine and arms, flowing into Neven and Hiro. Then the stone tiles melted under our feet and turned soft and damp. The world smelled of rain and fresh soil and wet grass. The numbness of Yomi disappeared, our new world cool with autumn wind.

I opened my eyes to the gray sky overhead.



Chapter Eleven


From my seat curled up against the window of the train, the seaside village flashed away into sparse cabins over grayed grass, then to winter-dry farmland, then to small inland towns with thatched roofs and snowy mountains on the horizon. Yuki Onna’s legend had said that she’d fled to somewhere colder and darker. According to Hiro, that likely meant the village of Shirakawa-go, the snowiest place in Japan that Yuki Onna hadn’t already torn through and then abandoned.

Neven and I sat on one padded bench, sharpening my knives on river rocks, while Hiro sat opposite us. A few humans had been milling about the carriage when we’d first boarded, but one by one they’d shuffled into other carriages, probably unsettled by the sound of knives grinding on stones. A conductor came by as if to scold us, but Hiro shot him a dark look and he immediately turned around.

“You should at least look at your hands when you’re using a knife,” Hiro said, the angry darkness fading from his eyes as the conductor walked away. I’d begun to understand what Neven meant about Hiro’s eyes being darker than black at times. He watched me with unease as I scraped my knife across the rock.

“I know what I’m doing,” I said.

Hiro didn’t seem inclined to argue with that, turning back to watching the passing scenery. I couldn’t help staring at his profile, the slope of his nose and cut of his jawline. Every part of Hiro looked pieced together from shattered glass, deathly sharp and prismatic. It wasn’t surprising that his presence unnerved humans, who had likely never encountered someone so exquisitely ominous. I had never seen a Reaper, even a High Reaper, with such an unsettlingly beautiful appearance. Even the Shinigami at the hotel had lacked the same sort of pull. Was there something about Hiro that set him apart from other Shinigami?

I could have continued staring, but Neven’s gaze burned on the side of my face, so I turned and looked out the window, as well.

This close to the mountains, it had already started to snow. The landscape around us had turned white and dead, farmers and cattle disappearing in favor of endless spans of snow-white nothing.

“Hiro,” I said, still staring out the window into the white hills, afraid my face would betray my thoughts, “what do you know about Yakushima?”

I know who you are, Ren of Yakushima, Izanami had said. That meant I had a home other than London, somewhere my mother had lived, or at least visited. I used to see her as some nameless shadow, but now that I knew where she’d come from, she was alarmingly real. Somewhere in Japan, she could be looking through a foggy window up at the white winter sun, just like me.

“Yakushima?” Hiro said. “It’s a tropical island in the south, covered in ancient cedar forests. Sometimes blue fires dance across the sea just beyond the beaches.”

I made a mumbled sound of acknowledgment, trying not to betray my fascination. I imagined the snow beyond the window melting away to lush wet forests and burning sun, trees a thousand years tall casting down cool shade. It felt more like a dream than anything that could have been mine. Surely my mother would return to a place as magical as that after being stripped of her title and presumably banished from Yomi.

“Is it close to where we’re going?” I said.

But my question must have sounded too urgent, because both Hiro and Neven were staring at me. I turned back to the window so Neven would stop trying to decipher my expression. It felt a bit like betrayal to think of “family” as anything besides Neven, and maybe that was why I didn’t want him to know how much I thought about my mother.