The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(52)
“Because,” Hiro went on, depositing a wooden vase on the counter, “I already poured out the gasoline from all the other lanterns into this sake pitcher.” He grinned, holding the vessel up as if making a toast. “It appears that you and I think alike, Ren of London,” he said, handing me the pitcher with a wink. I didn’t know how to interpret such a gesture, but I found myself hiding a small smile as I turned away, holding the pitcher to my chest.
“Only when it comes to plotting a murder,” I said.
We each took a lantern and headed back outside, the pitcher of gasoline tucked under my coat, held tight against my chest. With every step we took closer to the mountains, the chilled air grew colder, tiny ice crystals lacerating my face as if warning us away. As the layer of ice on the roads grew thicker and the ground slanted unevenly upward, Hiro snapped a branch off a nearby tree, yanked off some of the smaller sprouting branches, then jammed the jagged end of the large stick into the ground like an ice pick as he walked.
As we journeyed deeper into the mountains, the warm glow of the village faded away and high walls of snow and ice rose up around us, painted gray-blue in the shade. The trees loomed tall and endless in the swirl of white overhead, standing sentinel before a thousand tiny caves and crevices in the mountainside. The snow prickled on the exposed skin of my face like tiny biting teeth. The snowflakes themselves were not helpless ice crystals spinning to the earth but sentient and bitter insects, swarming around our faces, scraping at our eyes and ears.
No human could survive this temperature. Even as a cold-blooded Reaper, I thought the temperature might freeze my blood solid. Floating in the deathly frigid waters of the English Channel had felt comfortable compared to this.
The sound of wind scraping through the mountain pass grew louder in my ears. I couldn’t think through the screaming blasts of snow, couldn’t remember why I was there, where I was going, except farther and farther into the deadly cold.
A hand closed around my mouth.
Chapter Twelve
A bone-shattering chill stabbed through my lips and teeth. The cold pierced through my gums into my skull and crunched down around my brain, sending burning hot blood out my nose and breaking my vision into flashes of glassy white. Ice shot past my lips and ripped down my throat, into my abdomen, filling my organs with glass shards.
I couldn’t move away because my limbs had gone dead with cold. My vision cracked, like I was looking up through the shattered surface of a frozen pond, and through the broken prisms an ethereal woman loomed over me.
She had skin so white that she nearly vanished into the snow, frostbitten blue lips and hair tangled like the blackened and long-dead branches of winter trees. Her face betrayed no emotion, void as the snow-swept landscape. She was going to end my existence, and it meant nothing to her. I had hoped that when I died, it would have been for something that mattered.
“A little foreigner has wandered into my mountains,” she whispered. But her words might have been a song of the wind or a dying hallucination. I felt a distant anger at being called a foreigner, but it was hard to truly feel anything other than pain. She had trapped me in her frozen world, nothing but me and Yuki Onna and Death.
With another breath of ice into my lungs, and a sudden brightness that burned across my eyes, I could no longer feel my body at all.
When the brightness cleared, I was standing opposite Yuki Onna on a flat plane of snow, white sky and ice in all directions. I must have been dreaming, or maybe hallucinating as her ice wormed its way into my brain and started cutting wires. This Yuki Onna couldn’t be real because, unlike the Yuki Onna who had looked at me with dead eyes as she froze me from the inside out, this one had no face at all, only pale skin as smooth as an egg. The whole landscape blurred at the corners of my vision, like the hazy half reality that I saw in Yomi’s darkness. But instead of black, this world was painfully sterile white.
“Where are we?” I said. My voice echoed as if we stood in a great cathedral.
“We’re in-between,” Yuki Onna said, hundreds of voices speaking in unison. The low voices of men and the light voices of children all tied together into one chorus. Were these the voices of Yuki Onna’s victims?
“When my ice touches your mind,” she said, “I can see straight through to all your little secrets. That will help me make my decision.”
“What decision?” I said.
“Which part of you I’m going to eat.”
She stepped forward and pressed her hand to my throat. I couldn’t move at all, like my whole body had turned to marble.
“Shall I take your vocal cords and add your voice to my collection?” she said. Then her hands trailed up to my face, fingers crawling across my lips and forcing my mouth open, tracing up and down my teeth.
“Shall I take your tongue and steal your sharp words?”
With all the energy I could muster, I clamped my jaw shut.
But Yuki Onna seemed to have known what I was doing, for she snatched her fingers out of my mouth just before I could bite them off.
“Were all the villagers in Shirakawa-go not enough for you?” I said.
Yuki Onna said nothing at first. There was no sound at all, despite the shifting winds around us.
“I didn’t want to kill them all,” she said at last. “I had no choice.”
“There is always a choice.”
Yuki Onna shook her head slowly. “I had no choice,” she said again.