Chapter Twenty-Nine Lee #2
Lee pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, shaking his head. No, that wasn’t right. Hina had told Lee the story about
Okiku, but she wouldn’t have told his father because he hated ghost stories. The wind picked up, wailing through the open
window and knocking over the broom by the door, revealing the stain on the wall. The whole world was screaming at Lee.
“There’s no well on campus,” Lee said.
His father frowned. “Not on campus,” he said. “Here. In the yard.”
Lee looked up sharply at his father. His hands fell slowly to his sides.
“What?” he whispered.
“He was at the bottom of the well,” Lee’s father said, his eyes empty, expression flat. “Isn’t that strange, Lee?”
The ocean roared in Lee’s ears. His father kept talking, but Lee couldn’t hear anything over the crashing waves. He stood
up and tried to back away but tripped over his chair, falling to the floor.
The porch door clattered open, the wind tossing sand into the open doorway. Only yesterday, the sword ferns had scratched
against the windows, but now all of them were gray and dead, limp on the ground as the wind tore them to pieces.
James can’t be in there , Lee thought, stumbling to his feet and slamming the door shut. But if not in the well, then where?
Another frigid breeze slammed into him, and Lee turned to the door on the other side of the house, which was now hanging open
as well. All the doors in the house had flown open, wind spiraling through every room.
Lee shoved past his father and locked the living room door, then raced across the house and closed each door, one by one.
Open doors had started everything, and now everything was going to end with an open door.
He needed to seal everything up, and then he would be safe.
The wind wailed louder as he ran—the sound of his mother’s screams, the dying cry of the man on Sen’s porch, Hina yelling in the kitchen.
Lee locked every door, sealing all the sounds outside.
When he returned to the kitchen, his father was standing in stunned silence among dishes Lee hadn’t noticed he’d shattered.
Sweat plastered Lee’s hair to his forehead, running cold down his chest. Where is James Baldridge? Lee thought again and again and again.
“Lee, what the hell is going on ?” his father asked.
“I shut the door,” Lee said, his teeth chattering, hands trembling uncontrollably. “We’re safe now because I shut the door.”
His father’s frown deepened and he took a step forward, into the tiny square of sunlight cast from the kitchen window.
There, on his father’s shirt, was a stain.
It was the same shape as the stain on James’s shirt. The same shape that was not quite a circle but not quite a tear, the
puzzle piece that wouldn’t fit.
Lee grabbed a fistful of his father’s shirt, tugging him closer. Just like James, his father stayed limp because he didn’t
think someone like Lee could hurt him, wouldn’t realize he was wrong until it was too late.
Lee felt like he had a fever, the sudden wave of rage nearly sending him to his knees. The truth was on the other side of
the stain, he was sure of it.
Where is James Baldridge?
Lee could see it before it happened—he would grab one of the kitchen knives that Hina had so carefully sharpened for him, as if she knew what was coming.
He would stab his father straight through the stain and his blood would devour it and finally it would be gone.
Staring at it was like staring at the surface of the sun, boiling his eyes inside his skull.
He would stab again and again and again because to see and not know was unbearable. He had to get rid of it.
Lee released his father and turned away, gripping the counter to hold himself still. He could taste it—blood and rage and
the truth blurring through him. He didn’t want this, he didn’t want to, he loved his father, but his father was standing between
Lee and the truth.
He thought of Sen dying on the other side of the wall.
Cut me down , he thought— begged , even though she would never hear him because she was already dead.
He grabbed a knife from the knife block. It trembled in his hand, light glinting frantically off it because he couldn’t hold
it still.
“Lee?” his father said warily. “What are you going to do with that?”
Cut me down , Lee thought. Last chance. He pictured Sen raising her sword to him the way she had to the traitor in her yard because Lee was a traitor to his father,
to his own soul.
As Sen brought her blade down, so did Lee.
He gripped the handle as tight as he could, then stabbed his own hand into the counter.
He felt his father’s hands on him before he felt the pain, an earthquake that began in the bones of his hand and rippled through
his whole body. His knees shook and a wave of nausea choked him as the blood gushed across the counter.
“Lee, stop!” his father said, trying to grab the knife.
Lee wrenched the blade out of his hand and pressed it to his wrist. He would saw off his own hand—the blade was more than sharp enough, Hina had made sure of that.
It had cut through pork bones and raw squash and all those things were so much harder than human flesh.
Lee would be free. He could never hurt his father if he didn’t have the hands to do so.
He didn’t know how he would cut off his right hand once the left was gone, but it hardly mattered at this point—he couldn’t think of anything but blood and salt and pain surging through him like electricity.
Then warm arms closed around him and tugged him back, the knife clattering to the floor.
No , Lee thought, reaching for it with his free hand, but his father had wrestled him to the floor, far from the knife. His father
braced him in his arms, and Lee was too dizzy to fight back.
“ What the hell are you doing? ” his father said. “Lee, stop!”
Lee’s feet kicked helplessly in the pool of blood on the floor as he struggled against his father. What have you done? Why are you like this? Why can’t you be normal? He could taste the words his father had never said, could hear them even though he’d never spoken them, so why did they seem
so loud?
Blue light washed over his face, and for a moment Lee thought he’d fainted, but then he jerked his face toward the window
and saw it.
Police cars.
Lee looked back at his father, his expression stricken, splattered with blood.
His father couldn’t have called them after he’d stabbed his hand—there wasn’t enough time.
He called them before I came to the kitchen , Lee realized.
This was why he’d positioned Lee’s chair away from the window—so Lee wouldn’t see. So he could ambush Lee and send him away.
“Dad?” Lee whispered, meeting his father’s eyes, which had never really seen him, not even once.
Even now, his father looked away, because Lee seared people’s eyes like the sun.
Lee elbowed his father hard in the ribs.
He coughed and loosened his grip enough for Lee to break free.
Lee stumbled to his feet, slipping in blood and grabbing the counter with his good hand for support.
His father reached for him but Lee was faster.
He ran to his room and locked the door behind him.
His father was punching through the paper doors to find the lock, but Lee didn’t need more time.
He threw open the door to his closet.
It resisted his pull, stuck on something on the other side, but Lee pulled and pulled until it unlatched and he met a wall
of wood. He rammed into it with his shoulder and it fell forward with a crash. A dresser, Lee realized as he stumbled dizzily
to his feet, shoving the furniture back in place so his father couldn’t follow him here.
Lee fell to his knees, suddenly acutely aware of how fast blood was leaving his body. He grabbed a piece of clothing from
the floor and bound it quickly around his hand, but the room still spun. He stumbled into a small table and sent scrolls rolling
to the floor. Across the room, the painting of his mother stared back at him, tilting from side to side as his vision fizzled
at the edges. Let me out, Lee.
Footsteps approached as a warm fog tried to pull him under. Sen would help him. He could stay here. He never had to see his
father again. Sen would help him. He could see her face, her dark eyes, her cold hands that peeled the cruel world away.
Then the door opened, and the shadow of a man fell over him.
Lee only had a moment to process the glinting armor, the hard lines of the shoulders, the crushing realization that this isn’t Sen before the man shouted something in outrage that Lee couldn’t understand.
The man rushed forward and Lee dove to the side, shock quickly sapped by adrenaline. The man tried to grab Lee, but Lee glinted
away like a river fish and fell against the opposite wall. The hilt of the man’s sword gleamed on his belt, but he didn’t
draw it.
The ceilings are low so you can’t raise a sword indoors , Hina had said. So the next time the man lunged for him, Lee raced not for the door to the forest, but into the hallway.
He tripped over startled servants. One woman screamed as he stomped on her foot. Sen’s father raced after him with a roar,
all but shoving the door off its hinges.
Lee tried to turn a corner, but his feet were slick with blood and he fell into a paper door, crashing straight through it
onto the porch. He caught himself with his injured hand and the impact sent agony echoing through his bones. He didn’t know
how he managed to rise to his feet and avoid the first strike of the katana, but he somehow rolled off the porch as the katana
struck wood.
But after that, there was no escape. The man’s shadow eclipsed him, and he raised his sword, clean silver against the white
sky.