The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(67)

“I have to get him,” I told Hiro, splitting the seams of my kimono as I yanked the top layer off, stumbling toward the shore. “I have to. He’s... I don’t know how—”

“I’ll take you,” Hiro said, grabbing my hand.

“Take me?” I said, stumbling after Hiro as he pulled me to the sand. I didn’t know if he’d suddenly become searingly hot or if my own temperature had plummeted, but I felt like I’d grabbed onto a shooting star and let it drag me across the sky.

Hiro didn’t bother explaining, instead pointing to a giant sea turtle standing at attention on the shore.

“Hold on to me!” he said, lying down on his stomach across the turtle’s shell.

I swallowed but stepped forward anyway. There was no time to be embarrassed when Neven could be dying.

I draped myself over Hiro’s back and held tight to his shoulders, clinging even tighter when his warmth chased away the shuddering cold in my blood.

“Go!” Hiro said, patting the turtle’s head.

The turtle moved excruciatingly slowly across the shore, burdened by our weight. But once we were underwater, it sped through the ocean at a speed I hadn’t thought possible of earthly creatures.

The salt water blurred my vision and stung my eyes, but I could make out the silent walls of dark ocean and slowly swaying kelp flying past us. We cut through constellations of tiny silver fish and giant tuna that could easily have swallowed me whole, the smallest of them dying and rising to the surface as they brushed my skin. The sea creatures began to flee as if they sensed something was wrong with me, a mass exodus of squids and jellyfish and stingrays clearing a path for us. There were great tapestries of seaweed below us, flashes of hot and cold water, a slowly intensifying pressure in my skull. And then finally, there was Neven.

He floated limp and white in Iso Onna’s horrific shackles. Her teeth had latched on to the side of his neck, her hands in his hair forcing his head back at so sharp an angle that his spine would surely snap, if it hadn’t already. His clock floated in the water behind him, glinting silver, still chained to his clothes.

Was he even alive? I’d seen thousands of corpses in my lifetime, and he rivaled all of them in his paleness and stillness. My grip on Hiro’s shoulders tightened so hard that I thought I might snap his collarbone, but if I didn’t hold on to something, then the dark waters would consume me and drag me down to their lightless end, crushed by the water pressure, brain exploded out of my skull, soupy and formless as Yuki Onna.

The turtle surged closer and Iso Onna looked up, clearly not anticipating any company so deep underwater. As she pulled away from Neven, wisps of blood spun from his neck like billowing red smoke off a burning building. The ocean wiped away the red stain from the Yokai’s lips but couldn’t clean the rusty tint from the fangs that hung down to her chin. She hadn’t neatly tucked her fangs into an artery to drink like western vampires but had gnawed a chunk of flesh out of the side of Neven’s neck, severing the artery and tendons.

My brother had trusted me to protect him and now he was bleeding out into the ocean, and for that I hated myself more than I hated the Yokai who’d taken him.

I shoved away from Hiro and kicked through the water, snatching Neven’s clock by the chain. Ropes of hair locked around my throat and squeezed, but the pain only lasted a moment before my fingers closed around the clock.

The spinning clouds of blood halted. The serpentine locks of hair stopped tightening around my throat. Neven and Hiro and Iso Onna all turned to statues suspended in the sickly green sea.

I looked at my brother’s face, still and corpse-white, and something cold began to swirl in my stomach.

Suddenly, breathless pain shattered through me, like all my organs had been raked open, my abdomen filling up with boiling hot blood, my ribs shattering with the effort of keeping it all contained as the taste of Death crawled up my throat. Whenever I’d felt this kind of rage in the past, my bones had filled up with a violent and irrepressible blaze of light. But this time there was no light at all, only my blood screaming under my skin, a burning pressure fighting to rip open my veins from the inside.

The filtered sunlight at the surface of the water began to dim. Without the warmth of day, the temperature plunged colder, the walls of nauseous green sea turning gray and then black. The sting of Death ravaged my bones and cracked my spine into a rigid straight line, my fingers curling into fists.

I yanked at Neven’s clock until the chain tore from his clothes, then clamped the silver between my teeth to hold it still, my mouth filling with brine and blood. I took out my knife and hacked at the hair restraints around my neck, slicing lines across my fingers and throat in my carelessness.

I was not calm and impartial, the way Reapers were supposed to be. I was not skilled and precise, the way Shinigami were supposed to be. I was nothing but Death that bled from every organ and anger so vicious that it could tear the sky to shreds, drain the oceans dry, and crack the universe in two.

As soon as the hair fell away from my neck, I sliced through the locks binding the Yokai to Neven, but so much hair still floated in the water like a thousand greedy fingers. I hated the sight of it, the memory of it stretching longer out of her skull, the metallic texture, so I grabbed fistfuls and cut and cut and cut and cut and wondered distantly if this was how Ivy had felt when she cut my hair. The severed hair floated around us in a tangled cloud of black and the more I sliced, the more my rage expanded inside of me.