The Worst Sort of Ghost #2
“No.” Hiro pulled the gold lollipop back out, unwrapped it, and slid the candy into his mouth behind the edge of the mask.
He looked at his hands for one breath. Then he closed them into fists, and whatever had just moved across his face went somewhere deep and private within him.
Then he straightened. "I’m not okay at all. "
Goryū’s voice entered my head. Our father and Akiro are here. They are coming our way.
My hands found my guns before my mind caught up with them.
Every emotion that I could possibly feel crashed within me—fear and rage, hope and sadness, the craving for blood and the yearning for peace.
There was no more waiting.
No more wondering.
No more strategizing.
There was a moment in every man's life where he stopped becoming and simply was. Where all the years of preparation collapsed into a single point and what he built himself into either held or it didn't.
I had built myself into the Dragon.
Tonight, I would find out if being that beast was enough.
My mother's face flashed in my head. Then Jobon. Then Nura, though she was Hiro's grief more than mine. Then Hiroko. Then the faces of the dead I could not name—newly rotting in the Tokyo streets, the wedding hall, the man carrying a child who would not wake.
I would not waste them.
“Akiro’s plane is about to land.” I scanned all of them. “Get ready to make all of them bleed.”
Then, out of the dark behind us, hooded red figures arrived.
The Silent Ones.
Yes. Our brother was close with that name. They are Mugon no Ke. The Voiceless Blood.
Silently, they came from the trees the way smoke came from fire, filling the spaces between the trunks until the spaces were gone and there was only red. Dozens of them. Hooded. Faces swallowed by shadow so complete that the moonlight found nothing inside those hoods but dark.
The Silent Ones moved to the edges of our position and stopped, and the stillness they held was the stillness of people who had practiced it for generations.
Their weapons came out next. Blades. Bows. Things I had no name for that caught the moonlight in ways that suggested they had been forged for purposes older than this war.
Somewhere among them the Death Guardian was watching. I could feel it the way I felt Nyomi in my chest—a fixed point, a certainty, a presence that did not announce itself because it had no need to.
Every Claw, every Fang, every Scale at the tree line turned to look at them.
The forest held its breath.
Hiro's eyes swept the nearest hooded figures and his jaw set. Cold fury moved across his face.
The Silent Ones closest to him registered it and took one step back without a word.
The ones behind them did not move at all.
Kaoru tilted his Kuchisake mask toward me. "Are they with us?"
"Yes."
“Good.” Kaoru nodded once and looked back at the red figures.
Then, to probably all of our shock, Yoichi stepped out of the dark and held a gold kitsune mask in his hand. As he headed forward, his gaze moved to the twins and their matching black kitsune masks with the golden teeth and the silver whiskers swept back along the cheeks.
A dark groan of annoyance left Yoichi.
I blinked.
And the frown that crossed Yoichi’s face was so deep and so full of a specific aggravation that it ceased to be a frown and became a promise to beat their asses later.
Kaoru looked at Yoichi. "Brother. We fight together tonight."
Yoichi held the twins in his gaze for one more beat before he turned to Kaoru. "Always. I gave you a promise to always be at your side."
“You and your promises. You treat them like blood oaths, Yoichi.”
“Why are you here, Yoichi?” Toma crossed his arms. "You should be with our Tiger."
"I would not worry about our Tiger tonight." Yoichi lifted the gold mask and settled it over his face. The kitsune stared out at all of us, golden, expressionless, and ancient. "In fact, all of Tora’s enemies should worry about her. She is safe."
I thought about the rage I could still feel burning in my chest—hot, precise, aimed and then I considered that my dragon-shadow had said she smelled like another’s death.
I hope she has not killed anyone.
She has.
No. . .
And she is happy about it.
I closed my eyes and shuddered.
Tora. . .
It is done. She is safe.
I opened my eyes.
WAR!
Yes, Goryū.
Yoichi went over to the twins and said something to them, but this sound arrived before the plane did, and I could not focus on their exchange.
The sound was a low drone that started at the edge of hearing and grew, thickening the air, pressing down through the canopy until the leaves shook and the ground answered it.
The trees trembled.
Loose dirt lifted off the path in thin brown clouds.
The drone became a roar that sat on my chest and would not move.
I looked up.
Akiro’s plane cleared the tree line. It was enormous. The belly of it passed so low that the wind of its engines flattened the brush around us, tore leaves from the branches, and sent them spinning in tight vicious circles.
The landing lights swept the forest floor like two cold white eyes dragging across everything they touched.
The roar of it filled every space in my skull and left no room for thought.
Every man around me went still.
Even Hiro did not move.
I turned to Goryū. Tell me who is in there.
He was already moving.
Goryū uncoiled from the dark above us in one fluid motion. Black smoke poured off his body as his wings spread wide, and he rose toward the plane without sound.
He climbed fast, faster than anything with that much size had a right to move, and then his body folded and he drove himself straight up through the belly of the plane and disappeared inside it.
I watched the sky.
Reo watched me watching the sky.
Ten seconds passed.
Fifteen.
The plane continued its descent toward the landing zone near us, engines grinding, landing lights cutting through the dark below it.
Then Goryū dropped out of the far side of the plane's hull like smoke pushed through a crack. His body reassembled itself in the dark above the tree line, wings spreading to slow his descent, and he curved back toward us in a long silent arc.
When Goryū settled above the tree line, his gold eyes found mine. I could not harm the plane, but Akiro is inside, and our father.
My jaw tightened.
Our father. . .is pale and thin. The tubes are gone. He sits in the back behind Akiro's chair with two guns. He is afraid.
Good. He should be afraid.
There are ten others around him. Special.
Assassins?
Yes.
Goryū's great head turned slowly as he tracked the plane's descent. There are hundreds of men inside with pretty guns.
Pretty?
Diamonds and flowers on them.
The Butcher’s weapons.
The plane is full. Packed tight. Many pressed against the walls.
I looked at Reo. “Akiro, my father, ten assassins, and hundreds of men with the Butcher’s weapons are on the plane.”
Reo looked at me and blinked. “Goryū told you that?”
“Yes.”
“Well. . .okay then.” Reo lifted his head and yelled to the Scales near the tree line, “Call back our people! Plan B is in effect!”
Scales rushed off to give the order.
“Let them think we are terrified!” Reo headed off and we all followed him. “Everyone else hide! We will not go to them until they’re off the plane!”
Hiro got to my side.
I glanced at him. “The war ends tonight.”
Hiro looked down at something invisible on the ground, frowned, and then picked up his pace. “It does.”
Goryū.
Yes.
Get ready to weaken Akiro’s men.
Yes.