The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(62)

“You can speak in front of Ren,” Hiro said.

The Honengame’s nostrils flared, but the tenseness left her face. “No one has died in this town in the last fifty years,” she said. “The village is growing too large to sustain itself.”

My hands went rigid on the rocks. As a Reaper, the idea of half a century passing without Death was unthinkable. Were a soul collector ever so negligent, the population would balloon.

Hiro’s eyes widened. He shook his head, slowly at first, then quickly. “How is that possible?”

“It happens when too many people are dying in other places,” Maho said. “Izanami has to keep the death rate steady. If too many die in Tohodu, many more have to stay alive in Takaoka.”

“What’s happening in Tohodu?” I said.

Maho shook her head. “It’s not just Tohodu. It’s Shikoku, Hyogo... Wherever there are Yokai with an appetite for humans, too many humans are dying.”

Hiro’s face turned sickly gray, his eyes glossed over. “Why have the Yokai been overfeeding?” he said.

The Honengame frowned, a deep rumble echoing inside her shell, like an impending thunderstorm. “Go and ask them,” she said. “All I know is that my oceans are overfished and my village is overcrowded. Other Yokai are not my concern.”

Hiro rubbed his palms across his thighs, pretending to dry them of seawater. “I’ll leave some more lobsters outside of your cave before I go,” he said, his voice small. “I’m sorry I can’t do more.”

Maho hummed and nodded. “There’s something you should know about your journey,” she said, turning to me. “Place your hand on my shell.”

“Maho,” Hiro said, eyes wide, “I don’t know if you should—”

But I had wanted to touch the Honengame since she’d arrived, and I wasn’t about to refuse her invitation. Before Hiro had finished talking, I leaned forward and set my hand on the cool surface of her shell.

Blood pours down the stairs of the shrine.

My hand tensed on the Honengame’s shell. I tried to pull back, but my hand seemed magnetized, unwilling to release me. When I blinked, images flashed past my eyes—dim stone stairs and syrup-black blood and a white palm turned up to the sky. The Honengame’s seashell voice surrounded me, as if I was a grain of sand trapped inside her echoing shell.

Descendent of darkness, this is your fate.

My palm began to burn, and my vision faded until I stood in the total darkness of Yomi once again, the Honengame’s voice raining down on all sides.

That which you seek will never be found. The night will eat your heart and you will wander the darkness for a thousand years.

“What?” I whispered, even though the words wouldn’t reach my ears. “What do I seek?”

But there was no answer except for a slight twitching in the fingers of the corpse-white hand. I knelt in scalding hot blood, barely able to catch my breath through the scent of Death. There was so much blood, a river of it spilling through my fingers. Whose blood was it?

Warm fingers closed around my wrist and yanked my hand away.

I blinked, disoriented by the sudden return of light. I caught a glimpse of the Honengame hopping off the rock and splashing into the ocean.

“Ren, what did you see?”

I blinked a few more times and turned to Hiro, who still clutched my wrist, pulling me close to him.

“Blood,” I whispered, “and darkness.” I wanted to tell him more, but something about the words I’d heard felt too sacred to repeat, and I worried that speaking them out loud would make them true.

“Honengame prophecies don’t always come true after they tell people about them,” Hiro said. “It gives you the power to change it.”

“I don’t know what I would change to prevent it,” I said.

He sighed and released me. “I didn’t expect her to do that. Hearing a Honengame prophecy is a great privilege, one I didn’t expect her to extend to a stranger. She must have sensed something good in you.”

I stared at the spot where Maho had disappeared into the water. The image of blood and a pale hand and stone steps replayed in my mind. Whose hand had I seen?

“Ren.”

Hiro took my cold hand in his own. I couldn’t look at him, my vision still flashing with unwanted images.

“Whatever it is, you don’t need to be scared,” he said, his thumb caressing the back of my hand. “I told you I’d look after you.”

I nodded, but my gaze drifted back down to the rocks. Hiro held my hand as we left the shore and headed toward our hotel, but his touch didn’t warm me as it normally did. How could it, when my hands and knees still seared from the river of boiling blood? If the Honengame’s prediction came true, then someone was going to die in Yomi.

I stared down at Hiro’s hand linked in mine for the rest of the walk to the hotel. When I unlocked my room and found Neven asleep, I pulled the sheets back to examine his hands clutching a pillow. But I couldn’t remember the hand from my vision clearly enough, so it was useless. I lay awake beside Neven, trying to recall the scene in the changing shadows of the ceiling, hoping that the vision would return in my dreams.

But the night did not betray the secrets of the Honengame, my vision of pale fingers and crimson blood blurring until there was only darkness.