The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(86)

Neven stared rigidly at Hiro’s retreating form. When he was no larger than a speck of blue on the horizon, he turned to me.

He opened his mouth to speak, but before a single word could come out, the long, curved blade of a scythe hooked around his throat.

“Let go of the girl.”



Chapter Nineteen


Neven swallowed, the blade around his throat tightening at the motion and scoring a fine line into his skin. Behind him, a middle-aged farmer from the village gripped the long wooden handle of his scythe, his lantern abandoned on the ground a few meters away.

In my distraction, I must have relaxed the sheet of darkness over us enough that lantern light had pierced through it. Now a human was trying to stop us.

I reached for my clock but my fingers brushed over the fabric of my empty pocket. Neven had our only clock, and both of his hands clutched the Yokai.

The situation wasn’t dangerous for us, but it was definitely precarious. A lot of noise or light would send the other villagers running toward us, and while we could easily kill them, I had a feeling Neven wouldn’t be overjoyed by the bloodshed. But hesitation could mean a scythe through Neven’s carotid artery. He would be fine, eventually, but the injury would likely bathe the Yokai in blood, which would probably make her scream, alerting the rest of the villagers and creating another host of problems.

I sighed and withdrew a knife from each sleeve.

“You will kindly set down your scythe, or I will insert one of these into each of your eyes,” I said, gesturing with my knives.

“I don’t bow down to murderers,” the man said, dragging Neven closer and making him wince. Neven still clung stupidly to the Yokai rather than going for his clock, as if someone would rip her away.

My gaze shifted to the Yokai pressed against Neven’s shoulder. Perhaps she would give us more leverage.

I moved one of my knives away from the man and pointed it at Tamamo No Mae.

The man scoffed in disgust while Neven shot me a murderous look, as if I would actually kill her in his arms. It took everything I had not to roll my eyes at him.

Tamamo No Mae looked back at me with eyes full of reflected moonlight, her lower lip trembling. Even though she was nothing but an obstacle who might have hypnotized my brother, her show of sadness distracted me when I couldn’t afford to be distracted.

“So these are the monsters we’ve let in from the West,” the man said, his blade cutting deeper into Neven’s newly healed skin.

“I may be a monster, but I am from Yakushima,” I said, my grip tightening on the knives. Could humans truly see nothing but what I wasn’t? They always seemed determined to pin my faults on my lineage, when in truth I was just an innately bad person.

The man threw his head back and laughed, revealing yellowed teeth. “The Japanese don’t point their knives at children.”

“But apparently they behead teenagers,” I said. Neven was almost a century old, but the farmer didn’t know that.

Neven had begun to shift the Yokai’s weight to one arm, trying to slowly free his left hand. I wanted to scream at him to just drop the girl and grab his clock, but he acted as if she would shatter from a three-foot drop.

The farmer noticed his movement and yanked on his scythe, splitting the skin around Neven’s neck and choking him as a surge of blood painted his neck and collar. Neven dropped the Yokai and grabbed at the blade with his bare hands.

I had already let this go on for too long, and now it was getting messy.

In two quick steps, I crossed the distance between me and the farmer and plunged my knife up under his rib cage. Predictably, he released his scythe with a pained cry and Neven fell forward, coughing.

I didn’t give the man a chance to scream. I wrapped one hand around his throat and pushed him into the dirt as he thrashed, then held my blade over his left eye.

“I’ll have to do them one at a time,” I said as his brown eyes blinked rapidly, “but don’t worry, I’ll keep my promise.”

I leaned more weight onto his throat and his eyes opened wider with panic. His warm blood soaked my skirts where I straddled him, his thrashing growing weaker and eyes beginning to roll back in his head. In his final moments, I would no longer be “the girl from the West” but “the girl who ended his life.” All around me, Death swirled in noxious clouds. My skin went translucent and pulled taut against my bones, red veins twisting up my arms like serpents. I pulled my hand back to plunge the knife into his eye and imagined how it would feel, the soft squishing, the vibration of his screams. I would not show mercy again.

A hand closed around my wrist and snapped it backward.

The bone splintered audibly as Neven wrenched me to the ground. I shot to my feet in fury as the bones clicked back into place. One look at the frozen farmer told me that Neven had stopped time.

“Have you lost your mind?” he shouted. If I were a human, his fury might have intimidated me.

“I was helping you, you ungrateful—”

“He was subdued long before you tried to spear his eyes out!” Neven said. “First her grandmother and now some old farmer? Are you just going to murder anyone who looks at you the wrong way?”

“I didn’t kill the old woman!” I said.

But this only angered Neven more. “Of course you didn’t,” he said, “but it’s fine, because your beloved Hiro did, and he can do no wrong.”