“No, I’m not kidding. I’ve got these—” I make a halfhearted wave at her with the spike. “And I’ve got flashlights and ofudas and everything. Come on. The sooner we find Kagura and get out of here, the sooner we can find another hot spring to annoy you with.”
She finally smiles at my lame attempts at humor. She draws near and touches my face. Her fingers are cold but not as chilly as the fog outside. “Be vigilant,” she says before stepping into me, and—
—she isn’t breathing. She is fighting her way out of the
find him seek him take him
dank cold, bloodless fingers clawing at unforgiving stone, and she isn’t breathing. It takes so long, so long to find her way out of her water grave, and she isn’t breathing. Her mouth is screaming, the things inside her head are screaming, but the night around her feels strangely silent, unconcerned and
little deaths whisper whispering claws and bone find him
unforgiving as she reaches the top.
Her tangled corpse rises out of the well. Horrible noises rumble in her throat. She isn’t breathing. Her fingers, talons now, swipe at the thin air with growing ferocity, leaving grooves in the wind.
Her first decision as a dead woman is vengeance. She crawls up the walls of the castle, the castle that should have meant something to her, but it is a luxury she can no longer remember, because she
creatures flit blood and bone blood and bone
ashes lift find him take him find
him
isn’t breathing. She is looking for him. She is looking for him, because she isn’t breathing, and he is her
vengeance.
He is looking out the window, and he cries when she looms before him. For all his deformities, he is a soldier. He scrambles for his sword and draws it. She shrills her laughter when he slices through her body and finds no resistance, because she isn’t breathing and he can no longer
seek destroy kill feast kill feast kill eat kill eat kill
touch her.
For the first time, she sees the boy on his back. Wide-eyed, trembling, more skeleton than youth, the crumble of his clothes older than his age. She was not his first, and the rage
kill eat kill feast kill eat kill feast kill FEAST KILL FEAST KILLFEAST
grows that he could not even accord her that privilege.
The retainer begins to
KILLFEASTKILLFEASTKILLFEAST
KILLFEASTKILLFEASTKILLFEAST
scream.
And when it is over, she—
—I sink to the floor, forgetting momentarily that I have legs.
I need a few seconds to catch my breath while trying to blink the images out from my eyeballs. I’m usually treated to snippets of Okiku’s old life when we merge, but this was the first time I’ve ever been privy to snippets of her life after she died. I could feel the retainer’s fear and her gleeful satisfaction as her hands dug into his eyes. Viewing his death—however much he deserved it—leaves a foul taste in my soul.
I close my eyes and wait until the shaking passes. There will be more questions to ask Okiku later.
I retrieve my backpack, but I need a few minutes to marshal the nerve to peel the ofuda off the doors. Nothing comes screaming through the shoji screen, so I slide it open slowly, still expecting the worst. But there’s nothing waiting for me on the other side—pun intended.
“Here goes, Ki,” I mutter under my breath and start running.
I make sure to keep within the shadows, uncertain if any spirits can find me by sight alone or if they’re using some other preternatural sense. I don’t give them much opportunity, skirting from house to house while working my way toward the shrine. I can see it silhouetted against the dark night, and the rest of my trip is, thankfully, free of any mishaps.
I see a couple more of the human-sized silkworm cocoons along the way. I know Okiku would insist, so I dispatch them as well. The first carries the soul of a young mother and her child, and the second is a little boy’s. I’m not sure if this gives them peace, but at this point, I can’t do much else for them.
Several of the houses I pass are no longer habitable, though a few remain upright. The exterior of every house also seems to have a cabinet-like enclosure with multiple dividers along the outside walls, though I also see similar structures in the outdoor sheds beside these residences. I wonder briefly what they’re for but decide I have bigger problems at the moment.
The biggest of these turns out to be the shrine itself. The main doors are boarded up. I can’t find any other way inside, and I don’t have anything that could help pry them open. Ironically, I concede that a crowbar is probably the first thing Callie would have thought to bring.
Thinking about Callie makes my eyes sting. The idea that she could be trapped here as well terrified me at first. But there was nothing unusual in the photo I’d taken of her to show this, and that gives me some comfort, however cold.
She’s going to be so pissed we got separated though.
“Now what?” I ask myself.