The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(91)

Her words began to stir the air in the room, like an invisible fire stealing all the oxygen. Sweat beaded on the back of my neck and I started to feel light-headed, like I was falling while kneeling in place.

Wherever there are Yokai with an appetite for humans, too many humans are dying, Maho had said. Hiro had thought that meant the Yokai were overfeeding. But it hadn’t been the Yokai at all. It was Izanami cutting off their food supply.

I stared down at the hazy outline of my hands in the darkness and tasted bitterness, my fingers curling into the mats.

Izanami was eradicating the Yokai. And maybe some of them had deserved it, but not all of them, not the ones like Maho. But what mattered to me infinitely more than Yokai politics was that Izanami had used me as a tool and I hadn’t asked why. Death was supposed to be sacred, a task we executed to keep the universe in balance, not a tool to feed Izanami’s greed.

“You told me there was harmony, even in death,” I said. “I thought you had to work together with the Yokai.”

“Harmony?” Izanami said, the word hissing across the room with a waft of hot air. “Was there harmony in my husband leaving me to rot down here after I birthed his kingdom of the living? Every day, the population of Japan grows and he becomes more powerful, while I have to share with ghosts and gremlins too stupid to find their own food if it doesn’t walk straight into their gaping mouths.”

I leaned away, not daring to breathe as the waves of heat and the scent of decay became unbearable.

“I want Izanagi to know that the souls of his precious humans are in my stomach, building my kingdom and deepening Yomi’s darkness,” Izanami said. “I created Death. I am done sharing it.”

The floorboards creaked as if straining against their nails, the wallpaper tearing itself from the walls under the force of Izanami’s rage. Had I upset Izanami too much? At any moment, her anger might turn on me, stripping my skin from my flesh and grinding my bones to dust. I didn’t dare move, afraid I’d already said too much.

“And you, Ren, are mine, as well,” Izanami said. “If you live in Yomi under my care, you will do as I say without question. If I ask you to kill one thousand Yokai with your bare hands, you will.”

I bowed down farther to the ground, not out of reverence, but out of despair. I’d never imagined this outcome, but what choice did I have? How could I come this far only to be turned away and homeless in a land of eternal darkness?

“I understand,” I said, allowing my muscles to go slack and Death to crush me completely into the mat, my forehead sweaty against the reeds and my legs burning from the warped bow.

The chaos of tearing wallpaper and groaning floorboards settled, an eerie stillness falling over the room.

“I quite enjoy you, Ren of Yakushima,” Izanami said at last. “Unlike my Shinigami who were handed their rights at birth without question, you want it so much more... You are far stronger than your mother ever was.”

I stopped breathing. All the blood in my body rushed away from my brain and pooled hot in my feet. I played Izanami’s words back in my mind, sure that I’d misheard. If my mother was still in Japan, then why had she spoken of her in the past tense?

“Was?” I said.

“As I said before,” Izanami said, “she has been punished for her transgressions.”

“Punished how?” I said, finding the strength to tear myself away from the mat to lean up on my elbows.

“She was sacrificed to the creatures of the deep darkness.”

For a moment, the words meant nothing to me. I understood, objectively, that my mother was dead, and yet nothing had changed.

“You killed her?” I said, barely able to feel the words on my lips, not even sure if I’d spoken in English or Japanese.

“Are you so naive as to think she could live after what she’d done?” Izanami said. “She made her decision when she had a child with a Reaper. She knew the consequences and yet she tried to flee.”

I said nothing at all, for my mouth had dried up. My hands shook, but they didn’t feel like my hands anymore. Nothing about this moment felt like it belonged to me. I’d seen my mother so clearly when I’d pictured the beaches in Yakushima, the blue lights and forests and her house on the shore. How could none of that be real?

“True Shinigami accept their punishments with dignity,” Izanami continued, her voice low and bitter. “I could no longer let her live as my child after showing such cowardice.”

My nails bit into the reed mats, ripping the fibers loose. All of my life, I had been the girl no one wanted—no one but Neven. And it had hurt but it was fine, I was used to it, I knew how to turn that hollowness into a simmering anger that made me fierce and cold, the way Reapers were supposed to be.

But I hadn’t really been unwanted.

My mother had tried to run away with me. And Izanami had killed her for it.

All this time, I’d thought I would go to Yakushima and ask my mother why she’d abandoned me. I’d braced myself to hear a thousand reasons why I wasn’t good enough, why I’d brought shame to her family, why I shouldn’t exist at all, like everyone had told me my whole life.

But she wouldn’t have told me any of those things, because she’d never given me away.

Maybe she’d loved me, but now I would never know.

I closed my eyes and imagined a world in which my mother escaped Japan with my father, and a whole different Story of Ren Scarborough began to play through my mind. The Ren in this story never pressed her ear to the wall to eavesdrop on her brother’s bedtime stories because her parents read them to her in her own bed and held her until she fell asleep. Her mother taught her to control her Shinigami powers, so she never hurt anyone and never had to flee to Japan to become a murderer. She grew up to be the kind of sister Neven deserved, the kind of daughter Ambrose didn’t resent and fought hard to protect. Her classmates didn’t always understand her, but her parents hugged her when she cried and her father complained to the High Council when she was bullied, and she never ever doubted that her life mattered.