The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(88)

I stumbled away from him, falling to my hands and knees, bones aching emptily where the darkness had abandoned me. Once again, we stood in a dying rice field under the slowly dissolving stars.

“I’m going to be a Shinigami,” I whispered, “and so is Hiro. I won’t let you tell me otherwise.”

Neven sighed, sitting up and rubbing his sternum. The fox hopped into his lap and started licking his hands. “It doesn’t matter to me what you are,” Neven whispered. “You will always be Ren.”

I shook my head, wishing that I could understand why being just Ren and only Ren was supposed to be enough.

We sat in the soil, six feet apart that felt like a thousand miles.

“I’ll do as you wish,” Neven said after a moment. “If you think we should take Hiro to Izanami, then we will.”

I nodded, but Neven’s concession brought me no joy because I knew he still didn’t understand.

“You’ll take me, too, won’t you?” he said, even quieter this time.

I turned around. Neven had curled up around his knees, glasses askew.

“Take you?” I echoed, throat sore and raw, burned from the taste of Death.

“When you go to the palace,” he said. “You won’t leave me alone outside in the dark?”

I sighed. “Of course,” I said, standing up but not offering him a hand.

As we began to cross the shadowed fields in silence, I couldn’t shake the feeling that once more, something important had been irrevocably ruined.



Chapter Twenty


The second time we entered Yomi, the sky was even darker than before. This time, the total blackness not only hid us but erased us completely. The night numbed my skin everywhere it touched, as if something unseen was eating it.

Neven’s fingers latched on to my arm, and though I didn’t want him to touch me, I also didn’t want to argue anymore. He didn’t release me until I’d lit one of the many lanterns in the shrine at the banks of Yomi’s river, though it did little to disperse the heavy darkness. I could hardly see Hiro at the perimeter of our circle of light. The Yokai made no comment on the darkness, holding Neven’s left hand and walking beside him.

“What’s happened here?” I said, following the sound of Hiro’s footsteps onto the sandy shore.

“What do you mean?” Hiro said. He couldn’t have been more than a few feet away, but sounded much more distant. Why hadn’t he taken a lantern this time?

“The darkness is worse than before,” I said. “I can hardly see.”

“You’ll see better if you extinguish your lantern.”

“Hiro.”

His feet splashed into water. I followed the sound as Neven stopped to lift the Yokai onto his back.

“The darkness waxes and wanes with the power of the Goddess,” Hiro said, slow footsteps dragging through the shallow water. “Now that three powerful Yokai are gone from Earth, the darkness is stronger.”

Neven swallowed audibly behind me.

Hiro led us through murky darkness back to the dock and untied a boat to row the four of us back to Yomi. He climbed in first, staring across the black river without expression, then Neven placed the Yokai inside before stepping in himself, sliding over so I could join them.

Hiro pushed off from the dock without comment, his oar pulling slowly through the waters, as if the river had turned to tar. Soon, he began humming the same eerie lullaby that had pulled us across the river on our first journey. The melody tangled with the wind, echoing across the glass surface of water and endless cathedral of the sky.

But this time, after a few notes, the girl began to quietly sing the same melody. It had never occurred to me that the song had words, but the Yokai sang them by heart as Hiro fell silent.

Golden koi swimming in cold waters,
Let the sea carry you far away.
Do not come back home.
Spineless koi climbing the rapids,
Your scales were forged of darkness.
Your gills are filled with ash.
Cursed koi, lonely koi.
May you wash ashore and die.
May the river eat your bones.
When Hiro had hummed the melody, it had felt wistful and lonely. But with the Yokai’s voice, the same song sounded more like imminent doom.

I turned to Neven, but he didn’t seem to know enough Japanese to understand my unease.

“How do you know that song?” I said to the Yokai. I must have sounded too demanding, because Neven shot me a dark look.

“I don’t know, I just know it,” she said, shrugging.

I turned to Hiro. “What is that song?”

Hiro didn’t speak for a moment, rowing silently through the darkness. “It is a very old lullaby,” he said at last, with seemingly great reluctance. “It’s no surprise that the Yokai has heard it before. She is not as young as she seems. Memories may be resurfacing.”

“But why do you sing it?” I said.

Hiro kept rowing, still facing away from me. “They say that it is Izanami’s lullaby,” he said. “She sang it to her children, and they sang it to their children, and their children’s children. Long ago, Shinigami would sing it on quiet nights when they came to collect from rural villages, and the humans would know to lock their doors. But now it only promises safe passage across the river to Yomi.”

Perhaps that explained why the melody sounded so familiar—my mother might have sung it to me when I was a child.