The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(81)

“I am a creature of Death,” Hiro said. “Of course I’m horrible. And so are you.”

Then he leaned in and devoured me.

One hand locked my jaw in place while the other clutched my throat, my pulse hammering beneath his fingertips. His lips pried mine apart and our teeth clashed together but I wouldn’t push him away, not when his hand slid to the back of my head and pressed me closer, inhaling me with his exquisite darkness. Hiro was a molten star in my arms as he pressed me into the dead grass, his bones laid out against mine. He tasted of dark nights alone on a coastal town and half moons and stars too far away to touch. I melted beneath him and he crushed me into the earth, and in that moment, for once in my life, I could not feel the pull of Death in any direction.

I reached out for his hand, my clock pressed between our palms. My other hand cradled the back of his head, but this time my fingers tightened, locking around a fistful of hair and dragging him down to me. I tasted the syrupy darkness of Death, caustic as it seared our tongues. I rolled on top of him and held him hard enough to shatter his bones, locked him in place like I was about to extract his soul, trapped him, a pinned butterfly, mine.

The silence of the frozen night amplified the sound of Hiro’s heartbeat, his shuddering inhale as I bit and crushed and ruined him the way I ruined every good thing, and he lay there and let me. I leaned down and bit his neck, making him arch his back with a gasp. I thought of Iso Onna and an ocean full of blood.

I didn’t realize the clock had slipped from my hand until the girl screamed.

I shot to my feet, heart racing and dizzy eyes casting around the darkness. Tamamo No Mae had sat up in the grass and was yanking out the arrows from her flesh like splinters. They barely had a chance to bleed before the wounds sealed shut, but she wailed all the same, cheeks covered in tears, the sound of her cries shattering the quiet night.

“Grandma!” she cried, tossing the arrows to the side and trying to crawl back to the house, stumbling over her nightgown.

Hiro picked up the katana from the grass without hesitation.

“Stop!” I said, grabbing his arm before he could get any closer to the girl. “Hiro, she’s awake! You can’t—”

The door to the hut slammed open, the old woman standing in the doorway. The darkness filled in the lines on her skin and sliced her face into sections, making her look like a puzzle barely held together. Since I stood closer to the door than Hiro, her gray eyes locked on to me and narrowed. Even when I’d told thousands of humans that they were going to die, I’d never seen so much rage as I saw in the old woman’s eyes. The moonlight glinted on the sharp edge of a kitchen knife clutched in her right hand.

She charged across the yard with a ferocious scream, alarmingly fast for someone with crumbling bones and puckered gray skin. She held the knife above her head, aiming for my face or neck.

My clock still lay on the ground, so I waited for the old woman to come close enough that I could snap her wrist and take her knife.

But the moment never came, because Hiro ran between us and drove the katana through her chest.

The world fell into all its discrete pieces—Tamamo No Mae shrieking louder than Iso Onna, the old woman spilling blood from her lips with a wet retch, and Hiro bracing his left hand against the woman’s chest to yank his katana out again. The old woman fell limp on the ground, pouring dark blood into the dirt.

“Why would you do that?” I said, barely feeling the words leave my lips. Tamamo No Mae kept shrieking at an ungodly volume, and I could hardly think above the noise. The old woman convulsed and gagged on her blood as Hiro calmly wiped his blade on the grass.

“She was going to kill you,” he said, sheathing the katana.

“Humans can’t kill me!” I said. “I’ve told you that before!”

Hiro said nothing in reply. The old woman twitched and gurgled, her blood running across the ground and soaking the soles of my shoes. I should have cut her throat, or banged her head against a rock, or something to end her feeble death throes. But Tamamo No Mae was still watching and shrieking, and I didn’t know if such a display would actually be an act of mercy in her eyes.

“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, Ren,” Hiro said, his voice oddly measured for someone who had just slain a human in front of their granddaughter. “I just didn’t want her to hurt you.”

Once again, I didn’t know whether to be touched or horrified. My gaze fell on the dark purple teeth marks on Hiro’s neck, and my face burned. But it wasn’t time to think about that, not when the old woman’s corpse lay cooling at my feet, and Tamamo No Mae was...

I turned around, finding the yard empty. My ears rang from the memory of her screams, but she had slipped into the night.

“She’s gone,” I said, swiping Neven’s clock off the ground.

“She can’t be,” Hiro said, eyes casting around the yard and finally beginning to echo the panic that had hammered through my veins since time had started again. “She was just here! Can’t you stop time until we find her?”

“Not for the whole village,” I said. “I’m going after her.”

Then I took off running down the hill. I knew Hiro couldn’t keep up with me and I felt bad for leaving him behind, but I needed to catch the Yokai before we lost her forever. I still felt the distant pull of Death, but if she ran too far from us, I could lose it entirely. She could so easily leave the village and run into the rice fields, dooming us to another century of searching.