The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(56)

He let go of my sleeve.

I took off my remaining glove and dropped it to the floor of the cave. I didn’t know whether the fire or the cold would hurt more, but Neven needed to be able to touch me easily to wake me from his time freeze. I took a step back that felt like a mile, and peered out from the darkness of the cave, where Yuki Onna was looking through another small mountain pass.

I turned back to Neven and Hiro, who stood side by side. Hiro gave me a mock salute and gestured for me to go out. Neven held his clock on top of his long sleeve, eyes fierce and unafraid because he trusted me to come back, even if I didn’t quite trust myself. I hoped that, just this once, I could be the person Neven thought I was.

I pulled one of the matchboxes out of my pocket and stepped into the light.

Yuki Onna’s eyes locked on to me the second I left the cave, a head of black hair on her canvas-white landscape. I stood only a few paces from the cave, close enough that Neven could touch my hand when the time came. The match and matchbox trembled in my hands as she came closer, the scent of gasoline on my clothes burning my eyes.

Fear wanted to wrench open my rib cage like a book, but I held my breath and focused my gaze and shoved it back down. I would do this for Izanami. I would do this for Neven. I would do this because this was what Shinigami did, and I was a Shinigami.

So instead of remembering the sensation of my teeth turning to knives of ice and my organs shattering with cold, I thought about time.

Even without a clock, a Reaper knew how to use time as an instrument and weapon. Reapers had reaction times faster than lightning, and though I’d never excelled in that area, I knew how to time my actions correctly when I focused. I knew that if I struck the match a moment too early, Yuki Onna would run away and I’d have to cross the distance, narrowing the window of time I had to burn her before Neven had to drop his clock. But if I waited a breath too long, she’d fill my lungs up with ice and all of us would die. I visualized the ideal scene in my head as I’d been trained to do, the exact distance between us that would land her right in front of me just as the match ignited.

She crossed the invisible threshold, her frosted white eyes unblinking and blue-tipped fingers stretched toward me. I held my hands steady as I pinched the match between my fingers and poured light energy through my fingertips, igniting it.

The wind tore the match from my hand.

It spun off somewhere into the snow, the flame easily snuffed out in the turbulent winds. The ice beneath my feet felt paper-thin, the world prepared to shatter and swallow me whole.

Now the timing was ruined.

I should have lit the match sooner to account for this possibility, should have told Neven to stop time right before she touched me and not rely on me for a cue. Would he stop it anyway when she got too close, or would he foolishly trust that I was in control? Probably the latter. But by the time she touched me and he realized I was in trouble, it would be too late.

She was already too close. Her white hand reached for my face and my fingers felt too numb and even now I was hesitating, wasting the precious nanoseconds I had left, not fast enough to be a Reaper and not smart enough to be a Shinigami. Was there even time to open the matchbox and light another match? My fingers were shaking so hard I’d probably drop it. I was going to die and it was entirely my fault. I was too slow and stupid and scared to kill a Yokai and I should never have come here.

I held my breath as she came closer and closer. Yuki Onna couldn’t stop time, but it felt the same as Ivy with her scissors suspended over my eye for a small eternity, the anticipation of pain and the knowledge that I wasn’t enough of anything to stop it and the echo of her words that cut deeper than any of her sawtooth snowflakes ever could: a little foreigner has wandered into my mountains.

Foreigner, foreigner, foreigner, ever since I’d come to the place that was supposed to be mine, that was all anyone had called me. Once upon a time, the little foreigner wandered into Yuki Onna’s mountains and never made it home, even though there was no home to return to. That was all I would be to her—one sad story out of thousands.

Heat built up in my fingertips despite the cold, but with no light source to flow into, my anger burned into a fever so intense that my whole body felt like glass, a light bulb about to burst. I wouldn’t give her my story to add to her collection, because it wasn’t over yet.

There was no time to open the box and draw another match, so I crushed the whole matchbox in my left hand. All the anger and light and heat rushed into my fingertips until they burned white-hot, as if I’d closed my first around a shooting star, and all of the matches burst into flames.

My palm began to burn and blister, but I held the flaming ball up to my sleeve, which caught fire instantly. The flames surged around me like a hungry python, winding around my arms and spine to devour the path of kerosene. The heat began to gnaw through the layers of fabric, warming my blood, singeing the exposed skin of my neck and hands.

Yuki Onna saw the fire and stopped in her tracks, but it was too late.

I felt Neven’s hand on mine and opened my eyes to snowflakes frozen in place.

I lunged forward, dropping the matchbox, and wrapped my arms around Yuki Onna.

My hands sank into her spine like it was made of cream, great clouds of steam rising off her and swirling us both in their veil. I loosened my grip, careful not to hold her too closely and extinguish myself with the rivulets of water rushing down her body. Already, her white kimono had melted into milk and spilled over my shoes. Her face began to drip, her jaw stretching downward in a silent gaping scream that kept growing wider, the whites of her eyes streaking down her cheeks.