The Worst Sort of Ghost
Chapter thirteen
Kenji
Goryū remained a few yards deeper into the forest, away from the table and gunfire.
Here, the trees closed in tight, and the canopy sealed overhead, forcing the moonlight to give up entirely.
The Silent Ones must have placed Hiro here.
Yes.
Sleeping?
Yes.
Reo spoke at my side, “Can you talk to Goryū?”
“I’m talking to him now.”
“Fascinating, and what was the ritual?”
“I barely know. I had to drink something.”
“What?”
“It tasted like blood. I think it came from Nyomi. We didn’t have time for the details.”
“Our Tiger bled for this war?”
I clenched my teeth, got close to Goryū, and then I saw Hiro. They had propped my brother up against the base of a wide trunk with his back straight, his head tipped forward, and his legs stretched out in front of him.
His mask rested in the dirt beside his right hand.
His left hand held a gold lollipop unwrapped as if the Silent Ones were trying to apologize for an unintentional inconvenience.
His chest rose and fell with the slow, full rhythm of a man in deep sleep.
I stared at him for one long second.
A boom rolled across the island.
The ground shook.
Hiro did not move.
Reo studied him. “How is he sleeping?”
“I don’t know.”
“And someone placed him here?”
“The Silent Ones. You didn’t see them?”
“No. I think I would have noticed people carrying Hiro to us.” Reo shook his head. “Even more. . .who’s going to be the poor bastard to wake Hiro up and not die because of it?”
I’m surprised the Silent Ones didn’t die transporting him.
My brother was surely more dangerous asleep than he was awake.
Footsteps arrived behind us.
Then the Claws materialized from the dark—Kaede first, then Toma, Daisuke, and the twins arriving side by side the way they always did.
The Claws took in Hiro sleeping against the tree. Then they looked at me.
Kaede tilted his Tengu mask. "Where is the Tiger?"
"She is safe."
"But respectfully, Kenji. . .where is she?”
One of the twins spoke, “Is she safe and off the island?”
I considered lying to the Claws, but I’d already lied about the bombing of Tokyo being Akiro’s fault. I let out a long exhale. “She’s in the Bamboo Garden’s basement with the rest of the medical staff and Yoichi."
The temperature among the Claws dropped several degrees. The twins stirred. Toma's hand moved to the grip of his rifle and stopped there. Daisuke said nothing, which from Daisuke meant more than anything the others could have said aloud.
Kaede stepped forward. "She is on the island. In a basement. During a war."
"She is surrounded by guards and with Yoichi." I held his masked eyes. "She is the safest person on this island right now."
"She should be off—"
"She should be." I kept my voice flat and even. "She is not. The war arrived before she could leave."
Kaede stepped closer. "Then one of us goes to her. Right now. We fight better knowing—"
"No." I held his masked eyes. "Every one of you is needed at that tree line. Yoichi is with her. My mother’s people who are very strong are on this island watching over her. My Tiger is the most protected person here."
I looked across all of them. "The war ends faster with all of you in it. That is how you protect her. Understood?"
A beat passed. Long enough that I felt the weight of every opinion in that dark circle. They were not happy at all, but they would not fight me on this tonight, not with the war right around us.
The Claws exchanged the wordless language they had built over years of standing beside each other in bad places, and one by one they edged back.
I returned my gaze to Hiro. “Anyone want to wake Hiro for me?”
They backed up some more.
I sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it.”
Slowly, I crouched beside him and gripped his shoulder. "Hiro."
His eyes stayed shut.
I firmly shook him once. "Hiro. Wake up."
My brother moved before the words finished leaving my mouth. And it was pure violence, arriving fully formed, with the economy of a man whose body had learned to kill before his mind woke up to supervise it.
His left leg came off the ground in a tight upward arc, ankle rotating for maximum force, the heel of his boot aimed at the exact point where my jaw met my throat.
A kill shot.
Delivered from a dead sleep.
By a man who still had a fucking lollipop in his left hand.
I was not as fast as I should have been. The ritual had taken something from my legs.
Fuck!
I dropped backward and felt his boot pass so close to my throat that the leather brushed the air from my skin. If I had been half a second slower, my men would have watched Hiro break my neck before he opened his eyes.
Too. Fucking. Close.
Before I could think anything else, his right hand was already moving.
It came low, fingers not curled into a fist but spread and rigid for a deadly strike aimed at my throat. He was not trying to hurt me. His body simply did not know yet that it was me, and his body's default in the dark was to kill whatever it touched.
I rolled my shoulder back and his fingertips grazed my collar and found nothing.
His body was already adjusting, already calculating the miss, already loading the next sequence—I could feel it in the tension of his wrist when I caught it and held it still. “Hiro!!”
He froze, still sleeping, with the leg hung in the air at an angle that should have been uncomfortable. His striking hand sat locked in my grip. His chest rose and fell at the same slow rate of rhythmic sleep.
Behind me I heard the Claws murmur worry.
Of course his left hand still held the gold lollipop.
And then finally. . .Hiro’s eyes slowly opened.
He stared at the canopy first. Then the dark surrounding him. Then the muzzle flash strobing through the trees. Then the masked figures moving at the tree line. Then Reo's table and the four men moving pieces by phone-light farther away.
Next he found my face again.
Hiro sniffed. "You smell different. Why?"
"The war is here, brother."
He stared down at the gold lollipop. “Who gave this to me?”
“Probably the Silent Ones.”
Lowering his leg, he frowned and placed the lollipop in his pocket. “The bastards did something to me. Where is Nyomi?"
"She's safe."
"That's not an answer."
"She's in the Bamboo Garden."
Slowly, Hiro went quiet. He looked down at the ground between his boots and I watched his eyes move across the leaf-litter and the soil the way they moved when he was seeing a thing that was not there.
Does he see a ghost? I hope not. I need his mind with us.
I did not know what held his attention in that dark patch of dirt. His jaw worked once and then stopped. "What happened in that forest, Kenji?"
"A lot."
Hiro looked down at the dirt, seeing something the rest of us could not. His bottom lip quivered. Then, he stared at my hands. “What are those lines on your palm?”
“The war is here, brother. That conversation is for another time.” I picked up his mask and held it out to him. "Get this on. We need to fight. I have confirmation that our father is on his way."
Hiro took the mask from my hand. He looked at it for one breath—that single angle that showed mourning, that single angle that showed rage—and then he pushed it down over his face.
And because I was so different now, I appreciated Hiro in a more intense way.
My brother.
My weapon.
The most dangerous man in any room I walked into.
Always, I saw loyalty for me within his eyes. I had even seen devotion so complete it had never asked for a name. I had never let myself see what was underneath those things.
But the ritual had changed what I was capable of seeing.
In that one breath, before the Hannya mask swallowed Hiro’s face, I saw it.
Clear.
Still.
Undeniable.
Hiro was a king.
And not in the way I was a king—inherited, forged out of grief and necessity, built from the outside in until the architecture of it became the only self I knew how to inhabit.
That was my throne.
Constructed.
Intentional.
A thing I had learned to carry.
What I saw in Hiro's face, eyes, and even the line of his jaw was the cold economy of great power.
I thought about what it would look like.
Hiro in control of Tokyo. Hiro’s hands on the table Reo had built for war.
The pieces moving under my brother’s instruction.
The war running cleaner because the man reading it had been born to read it, not taught.
I thought about what the Claws would become under him—not just loyal, but freed into something the loyalty had always been reaching toward.
I thought about Nyomi too and our lives without this mafia empire.
Her laugh in a room with no war in it.
Our children I had not yet held.
Mornings of peace.
The throne had cost me everything I had not yet admitted I wanted. And I had paid without complaint because I had believed there was no other life—that the Dragon and the empire were the same thing.
That to release one was to destroy the other.
But Hiro put his mask on and rose from the ground in one motion, and I understood that I had been wrong.
The Dragon did not need to sit on the throne anymore.
The Dragon just needed to choose who did.
All the Fangs arrived—except Yoichi—and stood among the Claws.
Hiro brushed his clothes off. “Something bad happened in that forest.”
“I’ve got control of my dragon-shadow.”
“But at what cost?”
I looked at him. “I don’t know.”
“You should always know.” Then, Hiro put his gaze back down on the ground and this sadness filled his eyes. His bottom lip quivered again. “A bloody baby is the worst sort of ghost to see. It’s not okay.”
Reo went very still behind me. He said nothing. But I felt my Roar file that information away. Only my Roar could decipher and solve the puzzles of Hiro’s mind.
My brother continued to look down at the ground and a sad sigh left him.
"Hiro?” I touched his shoulder. “Are you okay?”