The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(53)

“Why not?” I said, trying with all of my strength to move my arms, even to wiggle my fingers.

“Because of Izanami.”

“What?” I said, giving up on trying to move and staring straight at Yuki Onna’s blank face.

That didn’t make any sense. Izanami had sent me to kill this Yokai because of her crimes against humans and Shinigami. She wouldn’t do that if she had caused it in the first place.

“What does she have to do with this?” I said.

Yuki Onna shook her head. “You’re not the first that she’s sent to kill me, you know,” she said. “And you won’t be the last.”

Then she reached out and pressed a single finger to my chest. It sank through my skin like my sternum was soft butter, until Yuki Onna was wrist-deep in my rib cage. But instead of the chilling pain I’d felt when she’d touched me in the real world, I felt nothing at all.

“I think I will like the taste of your heart most of all,” she said. “I don’t even need to freeze it first. It’s already made of ice.”

My breath caught in my throat. Was that some sort of joke? Of course my heart wasn’t literally made of ice, and I didn’t need moral judgment from a Yokai who had just eaten an entire village.

“I am made from the light that began the universe and the beginnings of time itself,” I said, my teeth grinding together. “I am not made of ice.”

“It is a blessing,” Yuki Onna said, reaching out her other hand to touch my face again. “When your heart is cold, you can have anything you desire. Nothing stands in your way.”

“That’s not...” I paused. That’s not what I want, is what I’d meant to say. But the words caught in my throat and wouldn’t leave, as if I’d been corked like a bottle of wine.

“I see why she sent you,” Yuki Onna said.

“What do you mean?”

Then Yuki Onna looked up, and the black eyes of a Shinigami stared back at me. Not just any eyes, I thought as I tried to back away but my feet wouldn’t move an inch, my eyes.

I tried to reel away, but whatever mind prison she’d put me in held me firmly shackled to the snowy ground. She opened her mouth as if to answer me, and I prayed that whatever words came out weren’t in my own voice, that she hadn’t already ripped out my vocal cords and swallowed them into her endless stomach.

But before she could answer me, she started screaming.

Her hand that touched my face turned to ashes and crumbled away, the pieces pulled up into the spiraling wind like a swarm of flies in the all-white landscape. She yanked her other arm out of my chest, but it too had already turned to ashes.

My hands throbbed. I looked down at red veins tearing through my arms, my skin dissolving until there was only bones.

“What have you done to me?” Yuki Onna screamed, crumpling onto the ground.

“I... I don’t know,” I whispered, watching as more and more of my skin became translucent, the red veins creeping up my arms, disappearing into my sleeves.

With a feral scream, Yuki Onna ripped herself from my mind.

I stood back in the freezing mountains of Shirakawa-go, my lungs full of ice, Yuki Onna’s hand over my mouth. Her eyes met mine, wide and alarmed.

Then the sharp end of Hiro’s walking stick pierced the side of her head.

Her hand withdrew and the ice in my body dissolved instantly, chased out by my body’s quick healing abilities and a wave of counter-heat that scorched my throat. I folded forward and the pitcher of gasoline spilled onto the ground, useless. Neven and Hiro pulled me to my feet and dragged my heels through the snow. I coughed out water and scrubbed my eyes, because the whole world still looked cracked and crooked.

Behind us, the Yokai let out a shriek like a mangled bird. Hiro’s blow hadn’t killed her.

My heels ground to a halt in the snow and I yanked out of Neven’s grip despite his protests. I waved toward my abandoned lantern, exploding it into a surge of light and fire that crashed over the Yokai. She screamed again and crumpled onto her hands as the flame sparkled at the ends of her hair, climbing its way up. The smell of fire and rot blew back at us in the wind with a spray of blue embers. For a moment, the flames subdued her. I dared to let out a relieved breath, pulling myself up straighter on Neven’s sleeve.

Then a layer of white ice formed across her clothing, as if her kimono had turned into glass. The fire went out, the ice hissing into steam that rose above her in a hazy cloud.

She rolled onto all fours with a thousand tiny cracking noises, maybe from the shattering of her icy skin or the splintering of her bones. I fell into Neven, trying to shudder away from the sound as it scraped the thin tissue of my eardrums. As she rose to her feet, every vertebra of her spine snapped into place one by one until she stood at her full height, looming over us and swaying with the evergreen trees behind her.

She watched us for a moment with the same blank indifference that I’d seen up close. Then she took a step forward, the snow crunching like a thousand glass shards under her bare feet.

Hiro tossed his lantern at her and waved as it arced across the white sky. It burst in a flash of light so bright that a thousand formless shapes danced across my vision before I shielded my eyes. Hiro must have been a more powerful Shinigami than I’d assumed, for his lantern burned sun-bright, far stronger than what I’d used to attack Ivy. The flame singed the Yokai’s hair and charred the side of her face as she screamed and collapsed, but once again a swirl of ice wrapped around her, hissing as the flame went out. She barely hesitated this time before standing up.