Chapter Sixteen Lee #2
His whole floor was a pool of black. The glossy surface reflected his own petrified face back up at him. He took a step forward
and slipped onto his forearms, sparks of hot liquid landing on his face, salt on his lips.
Lee Turner knew the taste of blood.
At once, he was back in the stairwell, holding what remained of James Baldridge, tasting death on his lips. Where am I, Lee?
Lee clenched his teeth and tried to ground himself in the present, in this house, in this room, in this pool of scalding blood.
Where had it come from? As the ripples settled and his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized the blood was spilling from
beneath his closet door.
Sen.
Lee rushed forward but his hands slipped and his chin hit the floor, the impact jarring his skull. He spit and crawled the
rest of the way to the door, pawing at the paper with slippery fingers.
Sen wasn’t supposed to die for three more days. She hadn’t even begun helping him yet. Lee was supposed to have more time
to figure out how her world worked.
He thought of Sen lying dead on the floor, melting into a pool of blood only a few feet away from him. He thought of her eyes,
which didn’t flinch when she looked at him, how he’d never been able to study anyone’s eyes like hers because no one else
would meet his gaze.
He managed to grip the edge of the door and slide it open, surging forward...
... and crashing into metal plates.
His teeth clanged against them, rattling in his skull. He’d barely pushed himself back when a hand seized his hair and tossed
him to the side. He skidded through blood, the salt of it stinging his eyes, searing his lips. He rose onto his hands and
knees as a shadow fell over him.
A samurai was standing in his room.
Not like Sen, who was the sharp edge of moonlight on flower petals, graceful darkness and silent death. This was a man wrapped
in sheets of black metal armor like dragon scales, a flared helmet with a golden crescent moon, thick leather gloves and golden
ropes and a sword made of moonlight. The brim of the helmet cast shadows over his face, but Lee could still make out his blazing
brown eyes.
Lee realized, too late, that he had been playing a very dangerous game.
Trying to manipulate the dead daughter of a samurai? What was he thinking? He’d lost his mind and upset a house full of ghosts. Sen had probably begged her father to kill him.
Lee had been so singularly focused on finding the truth that little else had mattered. But now, with a real warrior glaring
down at him, he wondered if all truths were really worth dying for.
The samurai stepped farther into the room, one hand on his katana. Lee scrambled away, his bloody handprints smearing down
the walls. The samurai had turned around to face Lee, so he edged closer to the closet, to Sen’s world.
The samurai said something in Japanese that Lee couldn’t understand—the man’s accent was thick, his voice low. Lee thought
he might have heard Sen’s name, but he couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t even looking at Lee, but staring at the corner of the room,
where there was nothing but shadows. The man took a steadying breath, and at last said something Lee could understand clearly.
“We live and die alone,” the samurai said. Then he drew his sword. Lee flinched back, ready to run.
But the samurai did not rise again. Instead, he unbuckled his chest plate and cast it aside, the metal clattering to the floor.
Then he turned his blade around and sliced across his own stomach.
Organs gushed over Lee’s bed, a surge of blood and yellow stomach acid and bile. More blood spilled from the man’s mouth as
he fell to his hands. He reached out a trembling, blood-soaked hand, gripping Lee’s bare foot before he jerked away. The man
grunted something in Japanese, but Lee’s ears roared like the ocean was trapped inside his skull.
Lee thought the force of his heartbeat would shatter his ribs. He tried to back away, but slid to his elbows in the blood.
When the samurai tried to pull him closer, Lee scrambled backward into Sen’s room and slammed the door shut.
It was jarringly bright, candles burning in the hallways that cast the far wall in orange light. He’d landed softly on Sen’s
bed when he fell, so hopefully no one had heard him enter.
He looked around, but Sen was missing, as was one of the swords from her hooks on the wall.
A bloody handprint slammed against the other side of the door, the paper threatening to tear.
Lee jolted back, rising to his feet unsteadily and heading for the hallway. He couldn’t stay here.
A shadow rolled across the hallway door, followed by the sound of a man speaking in Japanese too quickly for Lee to understand.
Sen had told him not to come here, and with the image of the samurai disemboweling himself over Lee’s bed, he was beginning
to understand why. This was not a family he could risk upsetting.
Still, he couldn’t go back to his own room, not now.
He shoved through the door to the southern yard and dashed barefoot across the clearing lit by moonlight, feeling naked under its glow.
No one shouted or came after him as he sprinted into the forest. He crushed roots and plants under his feet as he ran, flinching
as branches slashed across his face. His breathing was so loud that anyone out here would be able to find him, but getting
caught in Sen’s room seemed the fastest way to be disemboweled by her father.
He tripped over a root and crashed onto his hands. When he looked up, he was staring at the tip of a sword.
Moonlight illuminated the blade in white. The cutting edge was so thin it seemed to whisper away into the night. He imagined
it slicing through his spine like butter before he could form the words to beg. Lee’s father would never know what happened
to him.
Maybe this is what happened to my mother , he thought. Somehow, the idea warmed him. Maybe his mother hadn’t died but had stumbled through a door into another world.
Maybe the door had locked behind her.
The blade disappeared.
“Lee?”
Sen was standing over him, a katana in one hand, her eyes beautiful and terrifying in the moonlight. It lit up one half of
her face, her soft cheeks and stark eyes and dark hair blowing in the breeze. Lee had never been so grateful to see anyone
in his life. Sen hadn’t killed him on sight, which meant she didn’t want him dead, she hadn’t sent a samurai after him.
She cast her gaze around the forest frantically, her back turned to him. In the distance, men’s voices rose, too muffled for
Lee to understand.
“You can’t be here,” Sen said, whirling back toward him. He knew her blade wasn’t for him, but he still flinched at the sight
of her wielding it with anger in her eyes.
Sen sighed and sheathed her blade. “My father has found a spy,” she said. “He is not in a forgiving mood.”
Lee swallowed and peered back at the house through the branches. When his own father wasn’t in a good mood, there was little
consequence beyond his stern expression and look of disappointment. He had a feeling that Sen’s father’s displeasure would
not be as simple.
“Part of your world spilled through into mine,” Lee said. “I had to escape here.”
Sen exhaled stiffly through her teeth, then looked to the moon as if it could give her answers. After a moment, she stood
up straight. “I know where you can hide,” she said. “I’ve seen my brothers crawl there before.”
“Crawl?” Lee said, but Sen was already walking, waving for him to follow.
Sen moved like a shadow through the forest while Lee tore through it like a hurricane, snapping branches with every step.
She glanced over her shoulder, teeth clenched as they moved, but she must have known there was nothing to be done. Lee was
a torrent, in this world or any world.
She held out an arm to stop him as they reached the clearing once more, glancing around. The voices of men arguing in the
distance echoed across the yard.
“ Now ,” Sen said, grabbing Lee by the sleeve. He slipped in the dirt but she dragged him along, relentless as he tripped into the
bare moonlight. He thought she meant to bring him back into the house at first, but she released him just beside the door
and jerked a finger at the low porch.
“Crawl under there,” she said. “Don’t make a sound. I’ll come back for you.”
Lee hesitated as he stared into the darkness beneath the porch. He would barely be able to move underneath it. Like he was
crammed into a suitcase.
“Lee,” Sen said desperately as the voices drew closer.
Lee dropped to his stomach and crawled.
He fit under the porch easier than expected. Maybe because he was a mealworm, a centipede, something gross and undesirable
with thousands of prickly legs—that was how everyone always looked at him, anyway.
He shuffled as far as he could away from the moonlight until he felt a cement foundation against his side, then rolled onto
his back so his mouth wasn’t crushed into the soil. The dirt here was cold and damp, like a frozen grave. Strips of light
fell across his face, and he could just barely make out the patterned roof over the porch. He held his breath and imagined
he was a corpse, that this was his resting place, and somehow that made it easier. He turned his head to the side, where he
could see Sen’s ankles, her wooden shoes and white socks.
And there, coming from the forest, were two sets of footprints.
Lee’s heartbeat hammered in his ears. He was not a corpse, not yet, but he might be soon. If Sen’s father looked toward the
clearing, he would clearly see that two people had emerged from the forest, that one of them had crawled beneath the porch.
Lee remembered the keenness of Sen’s blade; her father’s was probably just as sharp.
He bit down on his sleeve, afraid that he would make a sound. Footsteps approached, one a steady beat and the other tripping
up the path, scraping at the dirt like they were being dragged along.
“The forest is clear,” Sen said, her words clipped.
“So he was alone,” said a man’s voice, gravelly and tired, but so low that Lee felt it through the ground. Sen’s father, most
likely.
“Yes, Chichiue,” Sen said.
Her father’s footsteps drew closer, and Lee could see his wooden shoes, his white socks splattered with blood.
The second man’s socks were dirty and torn, one of his shoes missing.
He fell to his hands and knees with a sharp cry of pain, and Lee could see that his arms were soaked with blood.
If he only looked to the left, he would see Lee beneath the porch.
“This is what you wanted to see so badly?” Sen’s father said. “Here you are, then. Here is my house, where my children sleep.
You got your wish. It is the last thing you will see before you die.”
Then someone lifted the man to his feet and the world thumped above Lee, the sky darkening. Sen’s father had dropped the man
onto the porch. The wood was only inches from Lee’s face, and he could smell the sweat and blood, mud from the man’s robes
leaking onto him. The man rolled over and scratched at the wood as if trying to rise to his feet, but he fell back down.
“Please,” the man above Lee said. “Please, I don’t work for anyone, I swear it.”
But Sen’s father’s feet were angled toward Sen—he wasn’t even looking at the man.
“It is a good opportunity to test the sharpness of your blade,” he said.
Sen said nothing, and Lee did not understand at first what her father was asking.
“My brothers are waiting on the other side of the wall,” Sen said quietly. “They will hear.”
“Let them,” her father said. “Your mother has raised them like girls. They need to understand the way that we live.”
For a long moment, no one spoke. Lee could only stare at their feet and try his best not to breathe.
“A true samurai would not hesitate,” Sen’s father said at last, followed by the sound of a blade unsheathing.
“Wait,” Sen said quickly.
Another blade unsheathed, and then Sen’s feet were moving toward him, stepping onto the porch, the floorboards creaking under her weight.
“Forgive me,” she whispered. The words were in English, which meant they’d been for him.
There was a flash of sound, the keen whir of metal slicing through air. A gasp, then a wet noise, like the flesh of a fruit
spilling open onto a plate.
And then the blood.
It poured through every seam of the floorboards, coating Lee’s mouth and eyes in salt.
He held his breath, even as its wet heat flowed over his hair, his throat, his shirt. He couldn’t breathe, or cough, or turn,
or else Sen’s father would hear. Instead, he lay there in silence, baptized by blood.
He remembered standing in a stairwell, James’s blood all over him, the exact same taste—salt, but also death, which had its
own peculiar taste, as if hopelessness congealed into its own flavor.
When he thought he might drown in it, he dared to turn his head to the side. Blood flowed into his ear, but he could still
hear Sen’s footsteps retreating.
“You claim to care about your brothers,” her father said. “This is the only way you can protect them.”
But Lee knew, because he had already read Sen’s story, that this wasn’t true. Nothing could protect Sen from what was to come.