Tiger Eyes
Chapter twenty-two
Hiro
As the plane headed back to the island, Kenji held me and I stared up at the twins’ ghosts.
Like when they were alive, they stood together in the red emergency light at the edge of the crates, side by side. Aki on the left. Yuki on the right. Seeing them stand there, whole and easy, was a hand closing around my windpipe.
Even odder, they were not in their battle gear and didn’t have their kitsune masks.
Instead, they wore the clothes from the Claws party.
Identical shirts made from layers of horizontal pearl chains.
They gave me peeks of their muscular chests and arms. They had on those same razor-tailored black pinstripe trousers that echoed the 1920s with black polished shoes.
Matching diamond gold watches covered their wrists as diamond studs decorated each ear.
Even their hair was the same from the party. Matching waves. Glossy and sculpted tight to the head with pearl barrettes layered through a few waves.
It was cruel that their ghosts had come back to me exactly as they had been on the best night of their lives.
They looked exactly the same. . .except for the wounds.
Aki carried his at the throat, a dark bloodied hole sitting under all that glitter and pearl. Yuki carried his wound at the side of the head, above the ear, the same place I had watched him press the gun.
The party clothes said one thing. The wounds said another. Both things were true at once, and that was the brutal agony of this moment.
Kenji held me tighter. “I’m so sorry, Hiro.”
The twin ghosts drifted toward me through the red light, and even dead and ruined, they moved in sync, one creature in two bodies.
Aki looked at Yuki. "Hiro said he could see ghosts, and we didn't believe him."
Yuki grinned, and the shimmering red on his lips caught the light. "I'm glad we were wrong."
Of course the twins would be the ghosts who talked to me.
It wouldn't be enough to haunt me, to stand silent in the corners the way the others did, the wrist-open woman, the half-faced fisherman, and all the rest.
No.
That would be too easy for the twins. They would be the ghosts to annoy me too.
Can I live with this? Is it enough?
I shut my eyes and tears spilled from me.
Kenji rubbed my back. “Goddamn it.”
I would have kept on drowning if not for the baby ghost.
She giggled, and it was this melodic sound of joy in this horrible moment of suffering. That giggle had no business existing around me.
Too bright.
Too cute.
Too certain.
She giggled again, luring me from the bottom of the ocean like a distorted siren's call.
Don’t laugh, little one. I just want to be sad.
Kenji rubbed my back again. "I'm with you, Hiro, and I'm never going to let you go."
The baby giggled some more.
What is so funny to her?
I opened my eyes and looked at the baby ghost. The view was blurry with tears, but the baby girl was on Kenji's back, watching me with wide eyes and pure delight on her face. She giggled again, and her chubby cheeks crinkled with the sound.
Why are you here?
The twins' ghosts gazed at her.
Yuki frowned. "Our Tiger has sacrificed a lot."
Aki nodded. "Too much."
I blinked. "What do you mean?"
Aki pointed. "The baby."
Yuki nodded. "The Little Tiger."
I shivered. "Little Tiger?"
Kenji gazed at me. "Who are you talking to, Hiro?"
Little Tiger? What do they mean by that?
I studied the baby girl, leaning all the way forward until my nose was barely an inch from hers, and the world went small, close, and clear.
Kenji had no idea what I was looking at right behind him. “Hiro?”
Her skin was a warm brown.
She’s Japanese, but she’s also from African descent too.
I’d known her hair was curly, but this close I could see all the tiny corkscrew curls. Her brown cheeks were full. Her mouth was a little open in that gummy way babies have when something delighted them.
And her eyes.
Those were Nyomi's eyes. That same dark depth. That same calm that should not exist in a world like ours. I had seen those eyes across a kitchen and in a war room. And I was seeing them again.
Yes. That’s our Tiger’s eyes.
However. . .the rest of the baby girl’s face was Kenji’s.
How did I not see that before?
The brow. The set of the jaw, even soft and unfinished. The shape that ran in my own blood. I knew that face. I had grown up beside that face all my fucking life.
I was looking at my brother and the woman he loved, folded together into a child the size of a loaf of bread, and my chest cracked at the impossible logic of her. My throat closed so hard I could not have spoken her name if I'd known it.
Our Tiger was pregnant. . .
My stomach twisted.
Did she know days ago?
I doubted it.
She would have told me. Kenji too. But still. . .all of the memories of these past days came to me different. All that time, Nyomi had walked into every room with a second life within, made of the two people I loved most on this earth. This little life curled within her womb.
Pregnant? Dear God. . .
A cold, terrifying shiver ran through me as my heart shattered into tiny pieces.
And. . .Nyomi sacrificed her for the war?
I didn’t know how she did it, but in my mind. . .I saw our sweet Tiger holding this precious life in her hands and tears falling from her eyes as slowly. . .she opened them and let the little life go.
For Kenji. For us. For the war. No, Tora. No. . .
This unbearable pain crashed into me.
Nyomi. . .you love us too much.
For some reason, my mouth filled with the copper taste of blood, even though none was within it. I swallowed it down.
Did Kenji know? There’s no way. . .
With this new knowledge, I looked at the baby ghost again.
She’s my niece. . .
She giggled at me again, and then those eyes—Nyomi’s eyes—began to. . .shift.
I trembled from the impossibility before me.
No ghost had ever done this.
Her black pupils widened for a heartbeat until they swallowed almost all of her irises. A second later the pupils narrowed, stretching vertically into long, feline slits.
What?
As the pupils reshaped, the roundness of her eyes subtly changed. The upper lids lowered at the outer corners while the lower lids tightened, giving her eyes a longer, more almond-shaped appearance.
Even on a baby's face, the difference was unmistakable.
She’s not just. . .a normal baby.
Next, the brown pigment in her irises dissolved from the center outward. Warm chestnut gave way to amber. Then, amber deepened into rich golden yellow until every trace of brown disappeared.
Oh. . .
Fine copper-colored streaks appeared within the gold, radiating outward from the pupils like tiny fibers. Thin black rings sharpened around the outer edge of each iris, making the color seem brighter. Only after the shape and color had fully changed did the luminous glow appear.
And what stared back at me from the baby’s cute face was undeniably. . .mystical tiger’s eyes.
I. . .don’t understand. What are you, baby girl?
She gurgled those little lips and a tiny bit of bubbly saliva left the corner of her mouth.
Off in the distance, I heard Reo talking to Kenji as my brother held me, but I could not turn away from the baby.
Little Tiger. Yes. That’s what you are. But. . .when did you come, and when did you die? The twins. . .they said Nyomi sacrificed so much. . .not you? Right? Please. . .
Tears spilled from my eyes.
She chose that moment to giggle again as she lifted her chubby little hand and reached for my tears.
I parted my lips.
Her finger met my skin.
A bright orange spark burst around my face.
What?
I felt her touch the way one felt a live wire through a wet hand. It was a single white jolt that did not stop where it started.
It went in.
It spread.
It became pain, real pain, chewing through my body from the cheek where she'd touched me down into my jaw, my throat, my chest, racing the long bones of my arms and legs like fire down a fuse.
"AHHH!" The scream tore out of me before I knew it was coming. My spine arched against Kenji's arm. Every muscle pulled toward the touch and away from it at once.
Kenji's hands tightened on me. "Hiro?! Hiro!"
I couldn't answer him. The pain owned my mouth and everything else. Cold icy power wrapped around me underneath the burning, and reality warped, and the cabin began to slide.
Across the cabin, Reo moved at a fighter's speed, honed by four decades of surviving rooms worse than this one.
His weight shifted onto the balls of his feet before the sound of my scream had finished arriving.
One hand rose toward the pistol under his jacket.
The other reached for me. His mouth opened around the shape of my name, and the first breath of the first consonant crossed his teeth.
And then he froze. . .right there. . .in that haunting position.
It was eerie.
Kenji froze too.
They both stood there like statues in the red light. Kenji's hand still bracing my shoulder. Reo's fingers still curled a half-inch from his holster, the other palm still reaching, his mouth still open on the H of my name that would never finish leaving him.
My baby niece giggled.
And then. . .I just left Kenji's arms with no fucking control of my body. In one second I was in his big arms. The next second, I was not in his arms and I did not move at my command.
And the twins’ ghosts were no longer around.
And the Little Tiger giggled louder.
And Kenji and Reo continued to stand there frozen in the moment somehow unable to see me.
And then. . .I moved, but. . .I didn’t go forward.
I went backwards, falling upward.
Retreating, instead of advancing.
It was as if. . .time had somehow hooked its fingers into my ankles and slowly pulled me inch by inch toward the old version of myself.
Back into the past moments I had already lived. Old seconds unraveled as minutes unwrote themselves and looped back.
I breathed in reverse.
My pulse no longer pushed through my veins.
The blood pulled and returned and then returned again.
My shattered soul regressed, stitching itself.
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!