by Zoe Marriott
“Um. Yeah.”
“This stuff is crazy. I was there, and I don’t even believe it.”
“I know.”
“I literally have no clue what happened. But I can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Right.”
“You ran out in front of a car. You should be dead, Mimi. Or in the hospital. I’m so glad you’re not – don’t get me wrong – but I need to understand why.”
“Yes.”
“Plus, I really hate it when you try to hide stuff from me. Which I can tell you are.”
“Sorry.”
“You should be.”
There was another long pause. We’d passed the shops and cafes now and were walking along the back of the Royal Courts of Justice. The huge, Gothic building loomed over us, its grey stone blocks and narrow-arched windows seeming to suck up the light. On the other side of the street was one of those office buildings that look like a load of shoeboxes stacked one on top of another. There were a couple of vans and cars parked along the road, but we’d left the traffic behind and there were no people in sight. The office building’s windows were mirrored, blank and empty.
“Are you going to say something?” Jack asked, stopping abruptly. “Or just let me go on until I stop asking because I feel stupid?”
“I’m not trying to make you feel stupid.” I ran my fingers through my hair, then tucked it behind my ears. “I’m trying to figure out how to tell you what’s going on without convincing you that I’ve done a Charlie Sheen.”
“Mio, I’m your best friend. I know you’re not mad. You haven’t even tried to shave your head or anything. Just spit it out.”
I took a deep breath, my gaze wandering past Jack to fix on the tall, wrought-iron fence at the end of the road ahead of us. Most of the fence was hidden by pasteboards and tarpaulin covers with a construction company’s logo on them. The fence made the road seem very closed-off and lonely. Jack leaned back on a lamppost, making herself comfy. “Still waiting.”
“OK, OK.” I took a deep breath. “I think it’s to do with the sword.” Jack started to speak, but I hurried on. “Remember how, as soon as I got him from the attic, the lights started playing up everywhere we went?”
“I suppose,” Jack said doubtfully.
“And pretty soon after, I started seeing things. Really scary things, Jack. Something was already wrong, even before we got to Natalie’s. I felt freaked out, and I wanted to hide him. Then I saw this guy, and I’m not sure if he was real or what, but he said some really strange crap to me – so I ran after him. I didn’t realize I was in the road. Everything went sort of blurry. And then when the car hit me, I heard this voice…” I could see by Jack’s face that she was not buying it. I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? How do you think I feel? What are you trying to tell me here?”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “The sword is old. I don’t even know how old. My grandfather told me that the Yamato family have been hiding and protecting him for at least five hundred years. He said it’s… It’s our purpose. I think there’s some kind of – of power in him and … I shouldn’t have messed with it.”
Jack looked at me hard. Finally, she nodded. “I suppose I can live with that as an explanation. Spooky antique sword. Messed you up. Made you imagine stuff. So now that you’ve put the sword back, things’ll go back to normal. Right?”
“Um…”
Jack’s eyes narrowed and she came away from the lamppost. “Right?”
“Jack, I meant to put him back. I really did. I tried.”
“What do you mean you tried?” she demanded. “How hard is it? Just put the effing thing down and walk away.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? What’s stopping you? You’re not making any sense here, Mimi.”
“I know that! I’m not trying to pretend that it makes sense, OK? I’m just telling you what happened. I went up into the attic last night after we got home. I put him in his box, I closed the lid and – and I couldn’t walk away. It hurt, Jack, really physically hurt. I was a mess. I couldn’t do it. He – he was calling me back.”
“He called you back,” she repeated slowly.
“This isn’t an ordinary sword,” I said hopelessly. “It’s like he’s trying to communicate with me, like we’re connected. And I’ve been having these dreams. For a long time, I never remembered them, but now I do and the sword is in them. It’s not… I can’t explain any better than that because I don’t understand. I can’t leave him behind. I can’t let go of him.”
“Mio,” she growled, her gaze suddenly riveted to my shoulder where the lump from the padded top of the shinai carrier showed. “Where is this sword … right now? Please, please, please tell me that it is back in the house where it’s legal.”
My face must have given me away. She smacked herself in the forehead with her palm and did a quick circle on the pavement, exasperation leaking out of every pore. “Oh come on! This isn’t funny. I don’t care if that thing – and by the way, have I mentioned how monumentally creepy it is that you keep calling a hunk of metal ‘he’? – I don’t care if it sings ‘I Will Always Love You’ and tap dances around your bedroom. You cannot just go walking around London in the daytime with a two-foot-long samurai sword strapped to your back!”
“I didn’t have a choice, Jack.”
“Of course you—”
A scream rang out, cutting through Jack’s rising anger. The noise died off with a wet gurgle that made goose pimples spring up over my entire body. Without a word, we both set off running towards the sound, Jack pulling out her phone as we went.
There was a narrow alley between the tarpaulin-covered railings and the ones of the red-brick building next door. I took one look down it and stopped dead. Jack, a step behind, nearly fell over me.
“Near the Justice building, on the corner of Carey Street and Grange Court,” she was saying into her phone. “I think someone’s been attack—”
Her voice cut off with a gasp as she looked over my shoulder. Faintly I could hear the 999 operator demanding more details. We both ignored her.
“Holy crap,” Jack whispered. “Holy crap!”
I recognized the person in the alley – the pretty face and the long red hair. I had seen her on the news in Jack’s flat before we headed out. It was the woman who’d been murdered at the museum. A dead woman. And she was ripping someone’s throat out.
She looked up from the man she was holding, her teeth bared in a snarl. Blood was smeared across those teeth – teeth that were way too long and sharp to belong in any human’s mouth. Her gaze fixed on me, and the bright blue of her eyes flashed yellow, like a cat’s caught in the beam of a headlight.
Her victim groaned weakly, and she flung him down at her feet like trash. Ragged clothes and a straggly beard marked him as homeless. There was a lot of blood on those threadbare clothes. My first impulse was to go to him and try to help, but another part of me – a part that had been humming with tension since we heard the scream – held back.
“Child of the Yamatos,” the woman said, and ice shot down my spine. Her voice was like a special effect from a film, a sort of cat warble with human tones underneath – but worse than that was the fact that she knew who I was.
Her bloody lips stretched into a smile that spread wider, wider, impossibly wider, revealing rows of needle-like fangs all the way back to her ears. “My Mistress was right. She said you were near, sword-bearer. Oh yes, the scent of power is all over you.”
“Run, Jack,” I whispered. I wanted to shout it, but my throat wouldn’t work properly. “Run.”
The woman’s body was spreading, losing its human shape as it drifted out into a mantle of darkness with nine long, trailing tails. An overpowering smell of animal, dung and wet fur, and something sickly and rotting, rolled over me. I gagged on the stench as memories unfolded in my head. This was the creature I saw fighting the boy in my Dream last night.
Every
night.
Desperately, I scanned the windows of the red building, but they were all veiled by thick grey blinds. The tarpaulins on the fence concealed us from the Courts of Justice. The street was deserted. There was a monster, a nightmare monster, right here, alive and walking around in daylight on the streets of London, and no one had noticed.
“Give me the sword.” The creature was suddenly right before me. I hadn’t even seen it move. “I know you have it. You awakened me when you awakened it. It is Hers. Give it to me.” Black, jellylike tentacles reached out for my face.
Something shoved me hard. I fell, and the tentacles closed on air.
Jack hadn’t gone anywhere. She was stood directly in the monster’s path in a fighting stance, fists raised.
“No!” This time my scream worked. But it was too late.
The creature lashed out at Jack. Its tentacles thudded solidly into her midriff and swept her right off her feet. She went flying over my head and crashed into the rank of motorbikes parked behind me. They toppled like dominoes. Jack disappeared in the tangle of wheels and exhaust pipes.
“Jack!” Terror for my best friend shredded my insides. I surged to my feet.
A pair of tentacles shot in front of me, blocking my path. There was nowhere to go. The monster chuckled richly.
“Help!” I yelled, stretching my hand out towards the street as if I could touch freedom. “Somebody help!”
Sudden, almost painful heat pulsed against my spine. I heard fabric – my coat – tear. A shining black shape flashed over my head towards my open palm. I cringed and then gasped as a familiar silk-wrapped grip slapped into my hand. My fingers closed around it as naturally as if it were part of my own body. My katana.
“Yes…” the monster hissed.
Mine!
I ripped the blade free of the saya and lunged at the creature in a wild, one-handed thrust. But I knew before the movement was half completed that it had no chance of connecting; Ojiichan would have despaired at the clumsiness of the strike. The creature billowed back unhurriedly, its body seeming to hollow out as it avoided the blade. I slashed desperately at its tentacles as they came near. It flicked them out of my reach. The extra limbs danced lazily in the air around me.
“Dear, dear, dear,” it said, a deep chuckle grating through its teeth. “You’re one hundred years too early for that, little girl.”
Like a monster in an anime, I thought in dazed disbelief. Is this really happening?
With no warning, two of the black tails whipped forward and wrapped around my wrists. The cold, creeping sensation of the creature’s flesh on mine made my stomach roll, and I thrashed and struggled furiously, almost choking with panic. Get it off, get it off, get it off!
It was no good. I couldn’t budge the tails an inch.
The creature’s face, which was growing more pointed and catlike as I watched – black-and-white fur sprouting around its eyes and mouth – drifted closer. The tentacles forced my arms up above my head so that the thing could peer at the katana.
“Veiled. Hidden all away. No wonder my Mistress’s other servants have sought in vain. Oh, this will hurt,” the thing whispered to itself. “It will burn. But She will reward me.”
Slowly, as if reluctant, another of the tails crept towards the katana. The tip of the black tail made contact with the metal and the cat-creature flinched. Then, in a swift movement, it wrapped the entire tentacle around the blade.
A high, whistling noise, like pressurized steam escaping, filled the air. The tail touching the sword seemed to solidify, turning from jellyish black to dull brown marred with dozens of tiny cracks. The katana’s blade glowed red, then white-hot. My fingers, wrapped around the grip, felt nothing more than the sword’s normal pleasant warmth, but the monster was in agony. Its shadowy body writhed, head whipping from side to side. The tentacles that held me prisoner jerked and trembled.
The whistling noise grew louder as the glow of the blade brightened. It was like a terrible, agonized version of the singing that I knew; a cry of pain. I could almost hear a voice in it, almost hear words in it. It was as if the sword was screaming my name. The sound rent through me and I struggled harder, but it made no difference. The monster’s limbs held me like steel cuffs.
The tentacle wrapped around the sword was beginning to crumble away like dried-out clay. The creature’s head was tilted back, its eyes shut, deep growls rumbling out of its gaping maw.
Mio! It was a cry of agony from the sword. Mio!
In a burst of desperation-induced strength I arched my back. The muscles in my stomach tore as I swung my legs up and kicked out with everything I had.
Both feet hit the cat-monster square in the chest. I bounced off backwards, wrenching the katana with me. The tail holding the sword disintegrated in a cloud of brownish ash. The monster howled as it lost its grip on the blade.
There was a boom of thunder, so close that it seemed to go through my body. My bones rang together like bells. White energy exploded from the blade, ricocheting off the walls like the sparks of a Catherine wheel, blinding me. The sword’s grip was ripped from my hands. At the same time the monster let go of my wrists. I fell to one knee, shielding my face from the light with my arms.
The beast screamed again. I forced my watering eyes open and stared in disbelief. A tentacle lay on the ground, sliced cleanly through. Dark liquid bubbled up from a wound in the monster’s side.
Standing between me and the monster, my katana in his hands, was a man.
He wore a black kimono. Glossy dark hair streamed down his back almost to his waist. As I stared up at his profile, an electric thrill of recognition travelled though me.
It was the warrior from my dream.
I grabbed one of the railings and hauled myself up. “Who – who are you?”
He stared back at me for a wordless, timeless instant. I didn’t think it was possible, but he might have looked as shocked as I felt. He sucked in a deep, ragged breath, as if to speak – but instead whipped his head round to stare at the monster again. Powerful muscles bunched in his back as he lifted the katana. Thick, black liquid dripped down the shining blade.
Then he spoke. He spoke with the sword’s voice.
“My name is Shinobu.”
CHAPTER 6
IMAGINARY FRIENDS
“You?” The cat monster hissed at the boy fiercely, gobbets of spit spraying out between its fangs. “I ripped out your heart five hundred years ago in the red forest! You should be dead, dead, dead!”
“Five hundred years?” the boy repeated. He sounded shaken. The point of the blade trembled in the air. “It can’t be…”
The monster’s eyes gleamed. Its remaining limbs shot forward, sharpening into deadly black claws as they curved around the boy.
He snapped to attention. I saw a flash of a pale, set face, as the sword scythed out in a shining, silver arc. Two more of the creature’s tentacles fell to the ground.
“Back!” the boy shouted.
The creature let out a high-pitched scream that made my eardrums vibrate, and scuttled away, trailing through its own black blood. “You shall not imprison me in stone again!”
“Well, it seems I failed the first time,” the boy said grimly. “I must try harder.”
“Vile humans!” the creature said, lips peeling back over its fangs. “You have no right to the sword! It is not for you. It belongs to my Mistress. Give it to me!”
Mine.
“No!” I cried out.
The boy’s sky eyes flickered to me and the memory of his death speared me like a knife; the blood spilling through his fingers, his pained wheeze as he fell. I can’t watch him die again. I shook with relief as I heard sirens echoing in the distance.
“The police! The police are coming!” I babbled. “They have guns! You’d better run now, or they’ll shoot holes through you, you stupid cat. Can’t you hear them?”
The monster’s face showed confusion for a second. “Guns…” it whispered, grimacing,
as if the word tasted bad. It stared at the boy, its tentacles lashing indecisively. Then a look of cunning crossed its face and it drew back, its shadowy form billowing upwards into an arch, like a frightened cat. The severed limbs on the pavement and the splotches of blood bubbled, running back towards the monster’s body in black rivulets.
“I will return,” it hissed. “And you will surrender the sword then – or die!”
The creature’s front limbs sprang up towards the top of the house next to the red-brick building, its body stretching out into an impossibly thin, black bridge. Then, like a rubber band snapping, the back limbs left the ground and the rest of it shot up, disappearing over the edge of the building.
Roof tiles cascaded down into the alley. The boy spun, scooping me up with one arm and pushing me back against the wall. All around us tiles shattered on the pavement with a noise like gunfire, but he was between me and them, sheltering me with his body. A chunk of broken ceramic bounced off his shoulder. He grunted with pain and I heard the katana rattle on the concrete as he dropped it.
“Are you all right?” I gasped out.
He shook his head wordlessly. Silky strands of his hair brushed my check. They smelled of pine trees and smoke. My nose nudged his chin. I wanted to look up into his face, but my own tangled hair was in my eyes. I tried to blow it out of the way. He made a tiny sound that could have been a laugh – choked and rusty – and suddenly gentle hands were combing back the unruly strands, deftly tucking them behind my ear. The movement was so natural, as if he’d done it a thousand times before. His fingers lingered there, just brushing the skin beneath my ear, making it tingle.
Now I could see him. The darkness of his almond-shaped eyes was filled with blue-grey curls, shapes like rising smoke, or the reflection of storm clouds moving over water. Didn’t I know those shapes? The singing was rising up inside me, a true, golden note – telling me that I knew those eyes. I was conscious of a crazy urge to grab his face and hold it still so that I could keep staring at him until I figured it out. Only I didn’t need to, because he was already holding still, staring back at me, searching my face for something – maybe for the same something I was looking for in him. Something … something…