The Night Itself (11 page)

Then I was remembering Ojiichan, lying in the bed in the High Dependency ward, and the dry rasping noises of his last breaths, the sight of the skin around his mouth crinkling up like tissue paper, that dull milky sheen on his eyes.

Stop it
, I told myself fiercely.
That’s not helping. Just think about something else!

Like what? Like the sight of Jack lying under that pile of metal debris? Like how it felt not to know, for a minute, if she was even alive or dead?

“Oh God,” I whispered, putting my hands over my face. They blocked out the too-bright lights reflecting off the cold blue walls, but not the constant background noises of suppressed panic and pain that grated over my senses or that hospital smell that was choking my lungs. Why didn’t they spray some freaking air freshener? It smelled nearly as bad as that thing – that awful thing – and it’s cold, creeping tentacles. God, what
was
it? Could it possibly be real?

Why did it come after me? Why did it want my sword?

“Mio-dono?”

It was freezing in here, icy blasts of air coming in through the door every time a new casualty arrived. I could feel myself shivering, but sweat was standing out on my face, sticky and uncomfortable.

What is happening to me?

“Mio!”

I jumped, pulling my hands away from my face. The boy was crouched on the floor in front of me, staring up into my face.

“Look at me,” he said, his voice low, a little rough. He leaned forward protectively. “I’m here. Don’t be afraid.”

Reluctantly I met his eyes. There was real concern there, as if he knew me. As if he cared about me. Without understanding why, I felt myself start to relax a little.

“Who are you?” I whispered shakily. “I don’t mean … I remember what you said, but who
are
you? Why—” I almost chickened out, then forced myself to say it. “Why have we been dreaming about each other?”

Suddenly he had that wary, vulnerable look again. “You have seen me in your dreams?”

“Yes. For a long time. Years.” I tried to figure out his expression. “I saw you fighting that monster. I saw you turn it into stone, and then I saw… I saw you …”
Die
. “… fall.”

His lips pressed together. “The connection runs both ways then. Did you see anything else? Did you see what happened after that?”

A green blade flashing down in the red light…
I frowned as the memory jolted through me. “Not really. What did happen?”

“Mio-dono, the last thing I remember that is real to me is the battle you saw in your dream. I was struck down, and I thought I would die and go to meet my ancestors. Instead … when at last I awakened, I was trapped. I know not where. There was no light. No nothing. Only confinement and blackness and cold. Endless cold. There was no time for me in that place. I might have been trapped for minutes or days or months or … longer. I faded in and out of awareness, and I wondered, when I could make space within my suffering to wonder, if I was in Yomi, punished, or exiled, or forgotten by the gods.”

“That’s – that’s horrible.”

“But then something changed,” he said, leaning further into me. “I began to see things in the dark. See and hear and feel. I saw an impossible place, with buildings like mountains, where people spoke a strange, garbled tongue. I saw monstrous machines, and great wonders. And I saw…”

“Me and Jack?” I finished, remembering what he had said before.

“When you were together, yes. Mainly, I saw
you
. Felt you…” His eyes dropped to my lips. “I saw everything that you did. Heard what you did. I felt what you felt, and knew when you were sad, hungry, angry, afraid… It is from you that I learned to speak this language – English?”

I nodded dumbly.

“I have seen this world before, through your eyes. Though it is very different being here in my own body. Being able to see and hear for myself, being able to touch…” His tanned fingers flexed on his knee, millimetres from mine. His hand was long and bony, and flecked with tiny white scars.

“Then when you said you didn’t know how you’d got here or where you came from, you
literally
meant that. The last thing that happened to you was—”

Death
.

He nodded, his face grave and set.

“And then” – I snapped my fingers – “you’re free, and you appear here, just in time to save me from a horrible death?”

His eyes flashed up to mine. A beautiful, slightly crooked smile spread over his face, lighting it up like a sudden blinding flash of the sun through thick clouds on a cold day. And just as suddenly, it was gone, leaving him thoughtful again.

“Yes,” he breathed. “Just in time. Mio-dono, I was with you yesterday when you entered the dark room upstairs in your parents’ house and took out the sword – my sword. But I saw something you did not see. When you laid hands on it you … you burst into light, into white flames that swirled around you and through you. Almost at once you began to feel things and see things. Shades, shadows, things that weren’t there. Those flames did something to you. The sword did something to you.”

“Wait. What about that guy? That guy who called himself the Harbinger. Was he real? Did I hallucinate him too?”

“No,” Shinobu said emphatically. “He was real. Even in the cold and dark I could feel his power. I do not know what he is, but he is … inimical to humans.”

“Then I got hit by that car,” I said slowly, following events back in my mind. “I thought I was going to die, but I heard a voice, telling me it would be all right. It was your voice.”

He lifted his head again. His eyes almost nailed me to the seat with their intensity. “You were dying. I could feel it. I reached out and tried to pull you back. I tried with everything I had. I strained and fought the blackness as I had never had the strength to fight before. Something … cracked. Within me or within my prison. Energy spilled out – more white flames – and for a moment you and I and the flames were …
one
.”

“Miss Yamato?”

I leapt up as if my seat had burned me. A new police officer – not one of the ones who had brought us here – stood near by.
Oh my God
. He couldn’t see Shinobu, so it must have looked as though I was having an intense conversation with thin air.

I forced myself to answer. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Your friend has had her x-rays. She’s asking for you, and I have some questions for you both. Then we can get you home. Come this way.”

Despite the reassuring words, the man’s voice was strangely flat and metallic, like he was really furious about something and trying to hide it. I tried to check his expression, but he had already turned away from me and was heading past the rows of seats towards a door on the other side of the waiting room.

“I think I’m in trouble,” I muttered to Shinobu as I followed the policeman, concealing the movement of my lips with a fake cough.

“You have done nothing wrong,” Shinobu said. “They cannot punish you.”

“Shows how much you know about the British legal system,” I said weakly.

The policeman pushed the door open. He gestured curtly for me to step into the room ahead of him. Shinobu slipped in silently, and the door clicked shut behind us.

It was an ordinary examination room, with a desk crowded with messy papers and an ancient computer, a curtain on a rail surrounding a high bed, and metal blinds over the windows. Jack was perched on the edge of the bed, looking bored. Her face lit up when she saw me. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Shinobu shouted.

I spun round.

He was frozen in the middle of the room, hands outstretched as if he had been trying to reach for me. His eyes were completely blank. Like a shop dummy. I looked at Jack to see if this really was my imagination, or something real again. She was caught mid-movement too, one foot on the floor, eyes glazed over.

It was as if someone had hit the pause button on both of them.

Someone?

For the first time I tried to look straight into the policeman’s face. I couldn’t.

Even in the bright fluorescent lights, even standing right in front of him, I still could not see him. My eyes just wouldn’t focus. It was like looking into a black hole.

“What are you?” I whispered.

He dissolved into darkness.

The room filled with a wild, screaming wind that lifted me from my feet and threw me backwards into the wall. My head bounced off the plaster, and I cried out. I felt the katana rip through the material of my coat again, shredding what was left of the shoulder to pieces.

I hung helplessly, feet dangling above the ground. Papers flew around me, shredding in the air. The blinds rattled like bones. My back and ribs screamed with strain. The wind was trying to push me right through the plasterboard.

The seething mass of darkness was directly in front of me, warping and stretching, changing. It became a human torso in a long, black kimono, the fabric covered with strange patterns of gold. Something pale slid up into view, the shadows trickling away from it like water down a window. A face.

Its proportions were strange, subtly skewed, too long and delicate to be right. Its eyes were closed, and its expression was blank. It was the man from Natalie’s party.

The Harbinger
.

Nothing was holding me to the wall. He wasn’t even touching me. But I couldn’t get free. My breath gulped and sobbed as his power drummed at me, pummelling my skin, my bones, my hair, my teeth:
Worship me, worship me, worship me…

When his eyelids lifted his eyes were gone. There were only shining, white globes, rooted in his skull, burning into me.

He held the unsheathed katana in one hand. The saya lay carelessly discarded on the ground at his feet. Tiny sparks of pale energy danced up and down the blade, bounced off his hand. I could feel the singing vibration of the sword reaching out to me, trying to find me, but something blocked it. He blocked it. He had taken my sword from me.

“What a small, ugly thing you are,” he said, contempt and a vast weariness edging his voice. “But you are the last of your line, so I shall preserve your life. Since your family seem to have neglected your education, I now do you the honour of enlightening your appalling ignorance. Listen to me closely, for I am the one whom it is your purpose to serve. Never forget that. You belong to me. This sword belongs to me.
Everything
belongs to me.” He lifted the sword and allowed the tip to hover at the vulnerable curve of my throat. The proximity burned, as if he was aiming a laser at my skin. The katana was crying out for me, but I couldn’t move, and it
hurt
.

“You are Yamato. You exist to protect the katana, as generations of your ancestors have done before you, stretching back to the day I first chose them. You will not fail me. If the sword is lost, you will die, hell shall open, and shadows and blood will devour this world. Do you understand?” The words reeled out of his mouth almost by rote, as if he had said them a thousand times before.

I nodded, the tiny, pained movement the only one I was capable of. My fingers clenched and my toes curled as the constriction on my chest increased. I could barely breathe.

The Harbinger sneered and turned away, removing the blade from my neck. He lifted the sword, pointing… Pointing to Shinobu.

Shinobu jerked back to life. He took one look at the situation – me hanging from the wall, the man standing in front of me, the katana in his hand – and blanched. Fury filled his face. He leapt forward.

The sword shrieked, the sound of its pain vibrating through me.

Lightning sparked at the tip of the blade.

Stakes of crackling white energy shot through Shinobu’s body. He let out a hoarse cry, doubling up in agony.
No, no, no!

“Don’t.” It took every bit of strength I had to force the word out. My voice was slurred and stumbling, as if I was drunk.

More bars of light sliced through Shinobu, impaling him to the floor. His voice cut off as if he had no more breath, but I could still see him moving, struggling, his hands clutching at the lino floor. His head flung back and I could see the shape of his mouth stretched into a silent scream.

“Stop it!” My back arched and was slammed against the wall. “Why?”

The Harbinger made a tiny tut of disgust. “So very stupid. I am repairing the damage – the damage that you have carelessly allowed, girl. Be grateful you are the last Yamato or I would have punished you for that carelessness.”

The bars of light sparked. Shinobu convulsed as if he was being shocked, his eyes rolling back in their sockets.

Then he began to fade. Literally fade away. The colours seeped out of him, like a watercolour if someone spills liquid on it. I could see the pattern of the lino through his back. He was disappearing right in front of my eyes. White fire flared up on the katana’s blade, rippling along the shining black-and-white curve. The steel almost glowed with relentless solidity as Shinobu disappeared.

He’s dying…

I screamed.

“Be silent,” the Harbinger snapped.

I can’t watch him die again. I can’t!
My heels drummed at the wall as I fought the unbearable, suffocating weight of the Harbinger’s power.
I can’t let him go. I have to hold on!

I screamed again. Screamed Shinobu’s name.

The sleek shape of the katana flashed. One moment it was firmly grasped in the Harbinger’s fist. The next it was gone. The Harbinger’s head snapped round, shock and sudden fear contorting his face.

The hilt of the katana hit my palm and my fingers snapped closed around it. Strength surged through my body, freeing me from the force that had held me to the wall, freeing me from the Harbinger’s death-grip on my mind. My feet hit the floor and my arm whipped the blade out like an extension of my own bone and muscle.

The Harbinger dodged so quickly that he blurred. But not quite fast enough.

My katana scored a long, shallow line diagonally across his torso from shoulder to hip, ripping the fabric of his kimono open. White fire burst out along the torn edges of the black fabric.