The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(51)

Neven screamed and fell back onto the icy ground, scooting away. The sound of his voice echoed forever through the silent mountain pass.

“No, no, no, I didn’t, I wasn’t—”

Neven kept babbling panicked nonsense, and I wanted to go to him, but I couldn’t look away from the one-armed man and the shards of bones and flesh and winter coat spilled across the street, the image so jarring that my brain wouldn’t accept it as real. Instead, I could only hyper-focus on the sharpness of each shard, unable to breathe and oddly warm despite the cold.

I knelt down and picked up one of the shards of the man’s arm, rolling it between my fingers. The sharp edges pricked my fingers, bitingly cold.

A shadow fell over me. I looked up at Hiro.

“Well, we don’t have to worry about whether or not this is the right village,” he said, his expression grave.

I nodded, the ice shard slipping from my hands and rolling quietly to the ground. “This must be why Izanami sent us here. She said the Yokai on her list had taken too many souls.”

A hollowness opened up inside of me, growing wider as I stared at the shards of flesh and bone. I didn’t know if I could ever feel empathy for humans the way Neven did, but I could see the wrongness of ending so many lives at once, of taking so much away from any one village.

Neven let out a sob that bordered on a dry retch. I turned around to find him pressed against a nearby tree, arms folded over himself.

“It’s all right,” I said, moving the pine branches away so I could kneel in front of him. “He was already dead.”

Neven swallowed, his eyes a sickly green. “I... I didn’t—”

“You didn’t,” I said. “Come on.” I tugged gently at his sleeve until he got the hint and stood up.

Hiro was gone when I turned around, but I heard movement indoors and followed the sound to a nearby store, where Hiro was busy rummaging through the contents behind the counter. The frozen cashier had dozed off on one arm, oblivious. Neven, following after me in a daze, kept a careful distance from him as we entered.

Hiro popped up from behind the counter and set two gas lanterns on it, then ducked down and retrieved one more, offering it to me with both hands.

“For the lady,” he said, leaning across the counter. Up close, his eyes twinkled with Death, magnetic in the way that terrible things often were. The longer I looked at him, the more my pulse raced and my skin flushed. Was this the infatuation that humans wrote about? I’d read Tennyson’s love poems with scientific curiosity, unable to grasp the concept and unsure if creatures of Death were even capable of such a thing. Tennyson had written of love and Death as opponents, Death a dark but fleeting shadow and love an eternal light. Surely, creatures made of Death could not love. Even now, was I truly drawn to Hiro, or merely the strong pull of Death inside of him?

I took the lantern and looked away.

“Pillaging already?” I said.

Hiro disappeared behind the counter once more and came back with matchboxes in each hand.

“The humans have no use for these things anymore,” he said, smirking.

“You think this is funny?” Neven said. “An entire village is dead.”

The smile dropped from Hiro’s face. He sighed, dropping a few more matchboxes from his pockets onto the counter.

“I’ve lived a long time, Neven. I’ve seen many humans die. Ones that mattered.”

“These people don’t matter?” Neven said. “How can you—”

“I don’t know these people!” Hiro said, slamming his hands on the counter so hard that some of the matchboxes spilled onto the floor.

Neven flinched away, the lights overhead buzzing.

“I told you I was raised by humans. Where do you think they’ve gone?” Hiro said. His eyes had gone gravely dark, no longer eyes but black portals to Yomi drilled into his skull. How had he gotten so dangerously upset and so suddenly? The lights overhead flashed rapidly from the wrath of Hiro’s anger, his shadow growing thicker on the wall behind him, like a black sludge painted across the wallpaper. Was this sudden darkness what Neven saw when he looked at Hiro? Was this why he hadn’t trusted him?

Then Hiro closed his eyes and rubbed them with his fist, letting out a shuddering breath. The lights settled, and when he opened his eyes again, they’d returned to their normal black.

“The heart of a soul collector is too small to hold that many people inside of it,” he said, turning to take a few pairs of gloves off the shelf and set them gently on the counter. “It has to be, or we would all end ourselves.”

Hiro tossed Neven some of the matchboxes, forcing him to uncross his arms to catch them.

“Yuki Onna has clearly been here,” Hiro said. “There’s a path up into the mountains that the villagers used to take when they cut down trees. I suggest we go there.”

“And what about burning her?” Neven said, his voice much smaller than before. “Should we bring firewood?”

“A lot of wood would be quite hard to carry and slow to ignite,” Hiro said.

“Are there any more gas lanterns?” I said. “Could we pour the gas into another container and take it with us?”

“These three lanterns are the only ones left,” Hiro said, gesturing to the ones on the counter with a resigned expression on his face. I sighed, glancing around the store for alternatives.