The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(92)

But that story was not mine, and I would never be anything but this—a walking Death curse with a festering heart—because Izanami had taken all of that away from me.

“So, Ren of Yakushima,” Izanami said slowly. “Do you still want to be a Shinigami?”

Tears fell hot onto my hands, splayed against the floor.

No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to work for someone as terrible as Izanami, the reason that I’d spent the past century and a half as a pariah in London, the one who had killed my mother.

But no one else in the world would take me.

I was no longer allowed to be a Reaper. I could be a Shinigami, or I could be nothing at all. The idea of being nothing and no one was so much scarier than dying.

“Yes,” I whispered, holding back a sob as I folded into the floor and my heart screamed no, no, no! This was ten times more humiliating than being threatened on a dirty London street with a pair of old scissors. I was a street rat with nowhere left to crawl, and Izanami knew it.

“Excellent,” she said. “Now, you may give me your clock.”

My tears stopped. I looked up through the heavy darkness, my whole body suddenly numb.

“What?” I whispered, conscious of the weight of silver and gold in my pocket. “How did you know—”

“I know all about the trinkets of Reapers,” Izanami said. “I may be old, but I have thousands of eyes and ears that roam the earth. I can say with certainty that my Shinigami have no need for clocks.”

I swallowed even though it scratched like glass down my throat, unable to hear anything but the quiet ticking of the clock in my pocket. So this was the true price of becoming a Shinigami.

There was a time when it wouldn’t have mattered to me, when I would have sawed off my own hands if Izanami had deemed them the hands of a Reaper, would have done anything to belong in Japan. All I’d known was tiny, broken England and its wicked Reapers with hearts as black as tar. But this land teemed with monsters and was crumbling apart from Izanami’s greed. I had traveled all over Japan but could never outrun the darkness of Yomi or the cruelty of humans. Everywhere in the world was its own hell.

“If you choose not to be a Shinigami,” Izanami said, “my guards will escort you out of Yomi. You will no longer be welcome in my domain.”

I slid my hand into my pocket, fingers running over the nicks and dents in the cool silver of Neven’s clock, the bite marks, the links in the chain.

If you cut all ties to London, then what am I? Neven had said. Am I even your brother?

I tried to tell myself that handing over Neven’s clock was not the same thing as cutting my ties to Neven, but even in my mind that felt like a lie. Without clocks, we weren’t Reapers anymore, just humans with unnaturally long lifespans. I thought of my own clock, trapped somewhere beneath the rocks of Takaoka, and shame curdled in my stomach. I’d been so busy hacking Yokai to pieces and swooning at Hiro and giving everything to be a Shinigami that I’d hardly even thought about it. And now I had to give away Neven’s clock, too? Perhaps he could figure out how to make a new one, but who knew how long that would take, or if it could ever compare to the clock that Ambrose had given him.

I knew what he’d think of me once he found out—that I’d looked at everything he was and decided it wasn’t good enough for me, that I didn’t want it anymore. It was impossible to separate being a Reaper from being Neven’s sister, because that was what I’d been in the century we’d spent together in London, even if both of us had been outcasts and disappointments, even if I’d tried so hard to erase that time and be reborn as Ren of Yakushima. But if I hadn’t once been Ren of London, I wouldn’t have had Neven by my side.

How unfair it was that after all I’d given up for Izanami, she wanted more. How dare she ask this of me, when without my Reaper powers, I would have been dead long before I’d even met her. I had defeated Yuki Onna and Iso Onna not because I was an exceptionally strong Shinigami, but because I was also a Reaper.

“My patience is not indefinite, Ren,” Izanami said.

I gripped Neven’s clock as it ticked even louder in my pocket, like a heartbeat against my palm. This was what I’d asked for, wasn’t it? To be something whole, even if that something was vile and dark. I’d wanted so badly to be able to choose for myself what I was, but this wasn’t a fair choice.

I slowly unclipped the chain from my clothes.

It doesn’t matter, I told myself. It’s fine, you’re fine, and it doesn’t matter.

I slid the clock across the mats, and the falling sensation in my stomach as the metal left my hand didn’t matter at all.

The metal scraped across the floor as Izanami snatched it, her nails, or perhaps bones, clacking against the silver. I bit down hard to keep from making a sound, my clenched jaw and the skull-crushing force of Death grinding away at my teeth. This is what you wanted, Ren. Your wish came true.

“The guards will take you to your new lodging,” she said. “You will return here tomorrow to meet an experienced Shinigami who will teach you how we reap. Your brother is free to take any job in Yomi, so long as he doesn’t interfere with the work of my Shinigami. Now go.”

With Izanami’s dismissal, Death began to drag me back toward the door.

“Wait!” I said, clawing at the reed mats. I couldn’t lift my arms through the leaden weight of Death to wipe the tears from my eyes, so I tried to swallow the soreness from my throat and ignore the wetness still dripping down my face. I had to hold myself together just a moment longer, because there was one more thing I hadn’t done.