Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
AKIRA
Light chased the darkness away with the chime of a broken bell.
Bloody hell! My poor ears!
Pain pulsated in the back of my head, as if I’d been walloped there, my eyes adjusting to my new surroundings.
“What the fuck?”
Smooth walls surrounded me, curving upward in the shape of a fishbowl. A hole directly above me showed me the full disk of the Cherry Moon surrounded by pink-washed clouds, blossoms wafting across it.
But the pretty light didn’t reach down here. A strange, off-white light did, emanating from the smooth walls of bone.
Yeah. They were bone.
Great. Just what I wanted to see.
I sat in the middle of the bowl, examining every inch of the place to find an escape route. The walls were perfectly smooth with no grooves for traction, and the curvature was too steep to run up.
Hmmm. I had been stolen, teleported to some bowl of bullshit.
So much for the anti-magic, eh?
The only level part was this small circle my booty rested upon.
Not looking good.
“As if that will stop me.”
I got to my feet, cracking my knuckles and taking some deep breaths. Echoes of my panic attack still lingered, and fear did its best to chew my guts out.
All the same, I wasn’t being beaten by this new twist. Because this was it now, the gun fired on a new round of bullshit. The fight brought to me before I went out there to find it for myself.
Good. Let’s get it done.
I wasn’t anyone’s bitch. I didn’t cower in the corner, begging the shadows to leave me alone. Okay, maybe a little bit for balance. Whatever. Sue me for not being a robot.
At the end of the day, I told you to suck a cactus, and then smashed your face in.
The real you.
No.
“Remember who you are.”
Hush it!
Right. Time for some bone-smashing.
“Bones break,” I muttered, hands balled into fists. “Get fucking ready.”
“Ready, you say?”
I jumped, turning on the spot at the sound of a woman’s voice speaking in Japanese.
“Who’s there?”
“The end.”
Ugh. “Oh, that’s a new one.” I rolled my eyes, disguising the boulder of stress in my tummy.
The speaker appeared on my left, halfway up the curved wall as if perched on a ledge. A thin, pale-skinned woman with half her face covered in flesh, the other half was just an exposed skull.
Yikes.
White rags hung from her emaciated body, wisps of straggly black hair clinging to a flaking scalp.
She lifted her right arm, the skin wrinkled. Her hand was nothing but flesh-free bone, her index finger pointed directly at me.
“Here he is.” Her voice was raspy and grim. The kind of sound to curdle milk. “The Taker. Akira Murakami.” The color of her eyes shifted between the phases of the Cherry Moon—pale pink to red and back again.
Her mouth didn’t move, those thin blue lips looking like they were glued together.
My kingdom for a sledgehammer. “Who are you?”
“Born of the mazoku,” she stated, “and the glorious magic around us.”
I folded my arms, dread my new bestie.
Made with the help of tenshi magic? This sucked. Hard. In the bad way.
She put her arm down. “I am the first to awaken. The one to end you, to feed on the joy of your undoing.”
“Another one I haven’t heard before,” I drawled. “Oh, and…” I snapped my fingers. “Good luck trying.”
What the hell were the mazoku doing with the Cherry Moon magic?
“There is nothing but your end here,” she rambled on. “You will see your failure. You will feel it, drown in its delicious potency.”
A clear oval cleared in a section of the bowl, becoming a screen. It showed me the room at the safehouse, and the body in the middle of it.
The dead body.
G’s dead body.
Ice filled my veins, the world going on pause.
He lay there on his back with wide eyes, his throat cut, blood pooling beneath him. His light snuffed out, nothing more than a lonely corpse.
Gone.
Gone.
Gone.
I’ve lost him…
“This… This…” I lumbered forward, trying to climb up the wall to the screen. I slipped, smacking a knee off the bone before sliding back down. “No…”
“This is the price you pay, Taker,” the woman spoke. “You took, we take.”
“Fuck you!” Wave after wave of abject torment crashed into me. “No! G!” I tried to scramble up the wall again, quickly sliding back down.
No. No. No. If I could just get up to that screen and smash it, the lie would break. Because this wasn’t real. He wasn’t dead.
“He can’t be dead!” I screamed, slamming a fist into the solid bone.
“The truth does hurt pathetic mortals, I hear. For that is all you are beneath the legend.”
“Get fucked!” My fists slammed into the bone, tears lava on my skin, fury and grief and the entire fucking kitchen sink caught in a vortex of horror.
“He’s not dead! He’s not dead! He’s not dead!”
I made my flesh knuckles bleed pounding at the walls, scraped my knees and palms trying to get up to that screen.
Why was he alone? Where were the others?
It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.
Just like Mama Rita hadn’t been real.
I knew the games these fuckers liked to play, especially the mental ones. I’d defo been around the block a few times to detect bullshit when I smelled it.
Me wailing like this made me putty in her hands. Pushed me into the web.
Not. Doing. It.
My honey bunny wasn’t dead.
I drew on every ounce of resilience I possessed and jumped to my feet. Adrenaline surging, rage focusing on one target.
Her bony fucking face.
Something fell past me, landing at my feet.
“What now?”
A small pile of pink sand sat there.
“You are a defiant one,” the woman said.
“Yep. What’s with the sand?”
From the corner of my eye, I noticed the screen vanish.
And there you go. Nothing but a lie.
“I see your love. I see your fear.”
Erm, okay.
“There are many ways of feeding upon your pain, Taker. You fear the loss of love. You fear the march of time. Question the purpose of love when it so easily slips away like the sand at your feet.”
Forget the sledgehammer, a rocket launcher would be perfect right now. “Stop babbling. I’m not here to be psychoanalyzed by the likes of you.”
“No. I suppose not.”
More sand fell past my face.
“You may not be tricked so easily into grief, yet you will know the pain of dying alone without the touch of love to warm your final breaths. This is your end, Akira. A ritual of undoing. Once you are gone, the gates are broken. You were the final barrier, the object of our own fears because of what you have done and who you are.”
“I’m flattered. But there’s only one of me.”
“One of you with the blood of them within you,” she returned.
“But still one.”
She stared me down for several beats. I considered my next move, coming up empty. This bony hell didn’t break easily.
“Did you bring me using the magic in the air?” I tried.
“There is not a hope or a prayer for you now,” she said, breaking the silence. “We are beyond the touch of the tenshi.”
I took that as a yes.
Not good.
Sand poured into the bowl through the hole, coming down like a heavy waterfall of pink. I fell back, spine slamming into the wall.
“Fuck it!”
The particles quickly filled the level part I’d been standing in.
“These are the sands of time you fear. Be lost to them. Die in them. Confirm to yourself how much of a burden love is.”
Panic set in a little, but so did an idea. Ride the sand all the way to the top. Use the walls as leverage as best I could, try not to sink, and then climb out of the hole.
Done. No death for me.
The hole closed over, cutting off the moon. All the light followed, plunging me into darkness. But the sand kept coming. Tenshi knew how, but it fell even harder, the whooshing sound hurting my eardrums.
Uh-oh.
Only the twin lights of the woman’s eyes remained, burning into me from her perch. Waiting for the death show.
Right, panic seriously set in, my breath freezing in my lungs for five painful seconds.
“Goodbye to The Taker,” Bony Hag triumphed. “Hello to the rise of The Nine.”
I want my G… my mind sobbed.
I pushed myself up, slipping against the wall. Sand battered against my legs, rising quickly.
“Remember who you are.”
I wouldn’t die like this in the dark. No. Not after everything, not when I was meant to be married.
“This ain’t the end of me,” I declared, albeit weakly.
Bony Hag didn’t say a word.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. The sand was past my knees now. Fine and soft, possibly not firm enough for me to ride to the top.
Defo a deliberate move.
Dammit. There had to be a way out of this.
G…
As a last resort, I tried to send my babies beyond the walls to find anything that might help. They tried, bless them. Searched for an out, sniffing and pawing at the walls, the sand, but found nothing.
Just as trapped as me.
“Every part of you is locked in here with me,” Bony Hag proclaimed.
Ignoring her, I muttered, “You’ve got this, babies.”
If only my enthusiasm wasn’t starting to melt like chocolate cake in the Sahara Desert.
Ugh.