The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(71)

Death will find her.

Ever since I’d left, Death had been nipping at my heels, reaching out his crooked fingers to just barely scratch me. I hadn’t wanted to think about what it might mean, and it was easy enough to forget about wilted flowers and dead leaves. But whatever the Reapers had cursed me with, it had spread beyond my hands and feet and infected every part of me. Maybe Hiro, who had lived for so much longer and knew so many humans and Yokai, would have an answer.

“I think,” I whispered, “I think Death is coming for me.”

“Death comes for all of us—”

“Not like that,” I said, shaking my head. “Before I left London, the High Reapers did something to me. I don’t know exactly what.”

I must have sounded delirious, like someone on their deathbed lost to fevered ramblings. Hiro waited for me to continue, his expression blank.

“There’s something horrible inside of me,” I said, looking down at my trembling hands. My skin remained almost mockingly opaque, my veins a normal blue, as if all of it had been a bad dream. “I think Death is poisoning me from the inside out.”

Inside, you are rotting, Iso Onna had said. I had always been blunt and selfish and bitter and now I was decaying, too, a putrid corpse releasing gases that attracted maggots, everything around me rancid and ruined. I felt myself filling up with darkness like a well after weeks of rain, night spilling over the top. But the most terrible part wasn’t what the High Reapers had done to me. It was that somehow, despite everything, I didn’t want it to stop.

It had to be a side effect of their curse, or maybe it had latched on to something dark and broken that was already there and grown roots. But how could I not relish the feeling of being able to crush bones like biscuits when all of my life it had been my bones breaking? Was it not supposed to feel glorious to finally be stronger than someone, to finally bring someone to their knees and make them feel fear instead of feeling it myself? Did that make me a monster...and did it matter if it did?

“Ren,” Hiro said.

I dared to look up, and once again Hiro was staring at me like I was every constellation in a clear sky. What about me could possibly warrant such a look?

“Whatever this is,” he said, “is it really such a terrible thing, if it helped you tear Iso Onna to pieces?”

“No,” I agreed, far too quickly. I wanted Hiro to be right. I wanted him to give me permission to be this way without apology. “But it’s going to kill me eventually. It’s going to work its way through my bloodstream and then stop my heart. Why else would the High Reapers do this, if not to kill me?”

Hiro’s eyes darkened. “I won’t let it,” he said.

“How can you stop it?” I said. “The High Reapers—”

“Reapers do not have a monopoly on Death.” Hiro’s expression turned bitter. “Death is not a dog you can teach to roll over. You can set her loose on others, but she does as she wishes.”

“Hiro—”

“I’m not going to let this curse hurt you,” Hiro said. “You’re too important.”

My throat went dry. Important. I had never been important to anyone but Neven. Always a scarlet letter to my family and a plaything for my peers. And yet, here was Hiro, whom I’d known for less than a week, and somehow he thought that I mattered. It didn’t make any sense.

“Why?” I said. “You saw all that blood in the water. You know what I did.”

“I’ll admit, this curse and your changing light powers are a dangerous combination,” he said, “but they’re also powerful.”

“And terrible.” I looked down at Neven in my lap.

Hiro shook his head. “Everyone has terrible parts inside them, even if they pretend otherwise. You’re just honest about it.”

“Not Neven,” I said. “Not you.”

“Is that what you think?” Hiro said, his voice dropping lower. He leaned over the fire, which had smoldered to embers. I couldn’t move without waking Neven, so I stayed perfectly still as he drew closer. In the dim cave, the only light was the reflection of the dying fire in his eyes. I didn’t dare breathe, afraid that the moment would shatter.

Hiro tucked a strand of wet hair behind my ear. His fingers, hot as embers, grazed my cheek and stayed there, holding me perfectly still while barely touching me at all. My heart beat so fast inside the frozen cage of my body that I thought I might break into a thousand pieces if not for Hiro’s touch somehow holding all of me together.

I thought of Tennyson’s poems, how love and Death were supposed to be archenemies, light and darkness. But Tennyson had never known Reapers or Shinigami, or the look in Hiro’s eyes like he saw the entire universe in me, the darkness in his eyes that somehow looked starving, ready to devour everything, and maybe I wanted to be devoured.

“Ren,” Hiro said, the word a reverent whisper as he leaned closer. Not Wren or Ren of London, just the name written on my spine, the one thing that I knew for certain I truly was.

Neven shifted in my lap.

Hiro drew back without a word, so fast that I wondered for a moment if I’d imagined everything, but I could still hear the quick drum of his heartbeat from across the embers.

Neven turned over and lay still again, and Hiro waved a hand to reignite the fire.