5. Now Comes the Pain
Chapter five
Now Comes the Pain
Nyomi
I sat on a stone gray slab in a thin red robe with my legs open to the night air. I’d placed Reo’s soul pin on the front of the robe, just to keep me balanced and because it was so important.
I was naked under the robe. Most of it covered the space between my legs.
Still, cold climbed through the fabric, settled into my spine and the backs of my thighs. Into every place the robe left bare. Goosebumps ran up my arms. My nipples ached against the silk. Each breath came shallow and thin, like my body refused to give the cold any more of me than it already had.
Or perhaps it wasn’t the cold at all.
Maybe, it was my unwavering decision to make this sacrifice.
Am I doing the right thing?
The Silent Ones surrounded me. Over thirty. They wore long, deep red robes with deep red hoods. Most of the fabric pooled at their feet in the dirt and the dead leaves.
I couldn’t see their faces. Shadow filled the hood where each face should sit, and the flame refused to enter it.
Four torches stood planted in the dirt at the outline of the circle, and their flames bent sideways in a wind I could feel nowhere on my skin. Yet, their fragrant smoke came to me in threads—pitch, resin, and burnt oil—and under those smells, the wet rot of dead leaves and turned earth.
In the surrounding torchlights the Silent Ones looked like figures standing in their own spilled blood.
Another group of six of them remained near the slab, standing so still that twice I mistook them for carvings cut from the dark. Then one would shift, and the red would move, and my heart would slam against my ribs hard enough to hurt.
I can see why no one ever knows who they are. They’re good at hiding, even when they are right in front of you.
My breath curled above me and vanished. Leaves shifted in the high dark. An owl called once, twice, and then went silent.
After that, the whole forest held still around this clearing as if it knew what we had come here to do, and how all would be changed forever.
Dear God. . .
I stared up at the moon. It hung full and white over the trees. Light poured down through the gap in the canopy and silvered everything it touched.
This will change everything.
I held that thought the way a drowning woman held a ragged rope, praying it could save her.
I needed home. The animal part of me wanted to roll off the slab, run into the black trees, and never stop running. That part of me screamed under my skin.
This is the only way. . .
And then just like that. . .a baby girl appeared in my arms.
She came without warning and her scent rose to my nose—fresh roses and honey, clean skin and a hint of powder. And I dragged her scent into my lungs like it was air and did my best to hold it there for as long as possible.
God, she was so warm.
The heat of her tiny body bled through the thin robe and into my frozen chest. My baby girl was the only warm thing in this whole cold clearing.
She had my brown skin and Kenji's eyes, dark, sharp, and already too clever for her own good. She fit against my chest like she had grown there. Like she belonged nowhere else. Her small hand closed around my finger and squeezed. Her whole fist barely made it around the one finger.
I would have let her hold it as long as she wanted.
I would have rocked her all night.
Still. . .
she looked up at me.
And she knew me.
And she trusted me.
I’m sorry.
Then, a warm hand settled on my shoulder.
I looked up.
My grandmother stood beside me and hummed a slow tune. Behind her, other women stood from my family. Some I recognized. Some I didn’t. It was a long line of them stretching back into the darkness past the torchlight—dark-skinned, broad-backed, every shade of brown.
Some in headwraps.
Some in chains.
Some so free it made my eyes water.
Trembling, I looked down the line of women stretching back into the dark.
Some watched the baby.
Some watched me.
One older woman stood with tears shining on her cheeks. Another pressed a trembling hand to her mouth. And suddenly I wondered how many of them had stood where I sat now.
How many had looked at a future they would never have?
How many had said yes anyway?
I shut my eyes.
Stop. Don't do this to yourself.
I opened them, and my baby girl disappeared, and the moon stared down where her face had been.
I breathed through my teeth and dragged myself back to the clearing and cold stone.
A large bowl waited on the ground between my open feet. Age had blackened it. Carved figures circled its sides, yet they appeared so worn as if smoothed by centuries of hands.
The moonlight poured into the bowl’s mouth.
A hooded figure stood behind the bowl. A taller person was on the right, holding the rod.
Swallowing, I stared at the rod.
It was thin, dark metal and longer than my forearm. It narrowed to a point fine as a long needle. The torchlight slid down the length and made it gleam.
Fuck.
I shivered, and a new vision came.
My little girl sat on a small bicycle in a wide green yard, and Kenji crouched beside her with one hand steady on the seat and one hand on the handlebars. He spoke to her as if it were the most important conversation of his life.
And then she nodded her little head and wobbled forward on the bike. He kept his hand on the seat and ran beside her.
Reo stood near with a massive medical team like he’d prepared for every possible injury to the Little Tiger.
But she remained balanced.
And when Kenji let go, she rushed forward and laughed.
And Kenji stood in the grass with the biggest smile on his face.
And Reo and the medical team clapped.
What are you doing?
I blinked and shoved that away.
The Death Guardian walked over. When I first met her tonight, she’d pretended to be an old woman with a hunched back. She’d held her cane in a shaky hand.
Now, she prowled over tall and muscular. Her gray hair was out of the bun and hung white to her shoulder. A fierce expression covered her face as if she were more than ready to fight the war tonight.
I’m glad his mother’s people will help them beat the Fox.
Another woman walked beside her. She looked smaller and older. Her hair fell gray and light blue all the way down past her knees.
When they both stopped by the slab, they smiled at me.
The Death Guardian followed my stare. "You're looking at her hair. Everyone does at first."
I dragged my eyes from the gray-blue river of it.
"She is an Itako." The Death Guardian gestured to her. “Do you know what that is, Tora?”
“No.”
"It is a spirit medium. A woman who speaks to the dead. They come from the north of Japan. The Tōhoku region—Aomori, Akita, and Iwate. Cold country that’s far from the cities."
The woman kept that smile on her face.
"There are very few left." The Death Guardian studied me. "For hundreds of years, families in those mountains took their blind daughters and gave them to older Itako to raise.”
I couldn’t quiet my journalist mind. “Why only blind girls?”
“A blind girl could not marry nor work the land, but she could learn how to enter the parts of the spiritual world where others with sight could not."
Perhaps, I was stalling the pain that would come, but I had to know more. “How do you learn how to talk to the dead?”
The Itako gave me a soft nod. "So many ways, my child. But it starts through fasting until hunger stops mattering. Cold water poured over me in the dark, again and again, until my body forgot how to flinch. Years of silence within the depths of the earth."
Cold crawled down my open thighs.
I held still.
"And at the end. . .” That warm smile returned to her face. "I wed a spirit.”
I widened my eyes.
“You may think of it more as. . .a god. And. . .this allows me to have one foot in our world and one foot in. . .the other.”
“Good. All pleasantries are done. Now for why we came here tonight.” The Death Guardian looked at my phone next to me on the slab. “Did you talk to the Dragon?”
“Yes.” I swallowed hard. “Kenji is coming."
Several of the hoods turned toward one another and whispered to each other. Then every covered head turned to the Itako.
The Death Guardian looked at her too. "What do you see now?"
"Better timelines." The woman’s voice came out soft and then. . .to my horror. . .her eyes rolled into solid white.
I jerked back.
What the fuck?!
Those white eyes glowed. "Much better. Yes. Not all good. Not all bad, the way it ran before. The really bad timeline is gone now. Erased. There is hope. Victory is possible."
I shivered against the stone. "There was a really bad timeline?"
The Death Guardian's head snapped toward me. "Don't ask her anything while she is—"
"Bad!!!!" The Itako screamed so loud I jumped. "So bad!!!"
Every hooded figure went rigid.
The Itako’s voice began to screech as she screamed, "They strung the Dragon's dead body up beside his brother!!!"
Terror ran through me. "What?"
"And the Fox had his way with the Tiger." The glow in her eyes brightened. "Then, his men took her over and over for days!! All of them!! Until she bled and could not stop bleeding!"
“Oh my God.” Horror crawled up through my body and sat in my throat.
The Death Guardian placed her hand on the Itako’s shoulder. “That is enough. Come back.”
"The Fox discovered the Tiger carried a child!!” Blood spilled from the corners of the Itako’s glowing white eyes. “He kept her beside him after that, put a chain around her neck, and kept her naked at the foot of his bed—"
"Enough." The Death Guardian shook her shoulder and then began to rub slow circles. "Come back to us. Come back now."
"And the Little Tiger!" The Itako's voice climbed higher. "The things they did to the Little Tiger when she came into the world. The things they did to her after."
No. No.
"And she lived through all of it!" The Itako's white eyes found mine. "That was the worst part! They made sure she—"
"Enough now!!" The Death Guardian raised her hand, and two hooded figures broke from the circle. "Take her. Let her calm down."
“Bad!!” The Itako screamed, “So bad!”
The new figures closed around the Itako and drew her toward the trees.