The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(83)

“But she’s just a child,” Neven said, turning to me with wet eyes as if I was the one who needed convincing. “Ren, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”

I knew he was turning to me for a solution, but I had none to offer him. Hiro went on berating Neven and he started to cry nearly as hard as the Yokai, but I could barely hear their words. I could only stare at the dirt road in the dark night that was nearly morning and accept the fact that all of this had been for nothing.

She knows when the souls of her Yokai leave Earth, Hiro had said. Surely there was no way around such an omniscient power. Unless...

I sat up straight, staring at the Yokai and trying to block out the sounds of Hiro and Neven arguing.

How, exactly, did souls leave Earth? In England, the souls of departed Reapers and other creatures of Death floated up to an unseen void. Japan’s monsters probably suffered a similar fate. But that wasn’t the only place that souls could go. Every night in London, I’d turned in the souls of departed humans to Collections, where they went through Processing and were tossed into an afterlife that the humans hoped was Heaven. But in Japan, the final resting place of human souls was not nearly as cryptic. In fact, we’d been there before.

“Is Yomi on Earth?” I whispered.

Hiro and Neven fell silent, both staring down at me.

I looked up at Hiro. “Is Yomi on Earth?” I said again, this time more clearly.

Understanding flashed in Hiro’s eyes. He closed his mouth.

“It’s not,” I said, his eyes the only confirmation I needed. “It’s on a separate plane, isn’t it? So if we bring her there, Izanami will think she’s dead.”

Hiro grimaced, as if physically pained by my suggestion. “It’s not a place for Yokai,” he said. “It’s bad enough that Datsue-ba is there, and she can’t even cross the river. Yokai are not meant to go to Yomi.”

“And Reapers aren’t meant to kill,” Neven said, eyes narrowed at Hiro, “yet here we are.” Then he looked down at the girl in his arms. “Mikuzume,” he said. She looked up at him, her eyes wide and brown and wet. “Will you come with me on an adventure?” he said in clunky and accented Japanese.

She turned to look at me and Hiro, her expression strangely stoic, as if she was assessing us. As she turned back to Neven, her eyes filled with tears that she smothered in his shirt.

“They won’t try to hurt you,” Neven said. “I’ll protect you.”

“He hurt Grandma,” she said, sniffling.

“I know,” Neven said, shooting Hiro a murderous look, “but he won’t hurt you, because I’m here.”

The girl didn’t respond, lying limp across Neven’s shoulder. He knelt to put her down, but she whined and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“She’ll come with us,” Neven said, as if daring Hiro to challenge him. If the girl had any objections to this, she didn’t voice them. Her crying ceased and she fell quiet and limp in Neven’s arms.

Hiro sighed and looked to me. “I suppose this will work as well,” he said, offering a small smile that looked more like a grimace than he’d probably intended, “but take care that the Goddess never finds out, or she’ll tear all of our souls to pieces.”

“We can be discreet,” Neven said, shifting the girl to his hip as she stuffed her thumb in her mouth. I groaned internally, praying that some of Hiro’s “connections” were hoping to adopt a Yokai and could keep a secret. Convincing Neven to hand her off would be a task, but likely an easier one than convincing him to let me kill her.

“We should leave,” Hiro said. “It’s not prudent to be the only strangers in a small village when they wake to find an elder murdered in her own backyard.”

We headed for the village gates, the Yokai watching me from over Neven’s shoulder. Her wide, unblinking eyes cast my own reflection back at me in the weak moonlight, and her gaze did not stray from my face.

We trekked back across the rice fields in the last hours of night.

Even as I clung to Hiro’s back, the crops wilted as I passed, leaving scorched streaks of black in our wake, the cicadas falling silent.

“It’s not helping,” I said, motioning for Hiro to put me down. “It’s better just to hurry.”

Hiro set me down, and the dirt dried into cracked clay beneath my feet. Neven walked behind us with the Yokai looking over his shoulder.

Now, all that remained for me was to find one of Izanami’s shrines and descend back down to Yomi. According to Hiro, there was a shrine a ways north in Niigata, a few hours by train. In less than a day, I would stand before Izanami again. Then I would be free to go to Yakushima and search for my mother in the red robes of a Shinigami.

I didn’t feel any relief now that we were heading back to Yomi, too aware of the precariousness of my situation. Any number of things could go wrong now that we’d added another layer of risk with the Yokai.

I glanced at Tamamo No Mae, whose gaze followed me like a magnet no matter where I moved. Something about her dead-eyed stare made my bones itch and my skin prickle. I wished, not for the first time, that Neven wasn’t such a good person.

I turned to Hiro instead, but looked away as soon as he met my eyes. I could still feel his hands crushing me into the dirt and my lips tracing his pulse across his throat and a thousand other things I didn’t want to think about with my brother walking beside me. Now that we’d crossed an unspoken line, was I meant to hold his hand and insist we never be parted, as the humans wrote in their penny romances? I certainly didn’t want that, nor did it seem realistic given our circumstances. But I couldn’t deny that I didn’t want Hiro to go very far.