Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty

There is no limit to the number of curses in the world. For each one the monks try to exorcise, ten more take its place.

We are not here because we enjoy it though. Please don’t misunderstand. As you dip into steaming bath waters, entwine your bodies under warm sheets, and dream of delicious sake under spring flowers, know that we are always burning.

The crows cawed from atop the shingled roof of the outer hall. Wind chilled through the branches of the plum trees, their early spring buds like tiny eyes.

Akechi stood in the garden in front of the temple’s wilting tulips and gardenias, a pair of shearing scissors in hand. He frowned when he saw me. I wasn’t allowed in the garden, but I’d already memorized the schedule of the others. This was the only time I knew we could be alone.

Akechi studied the blackening fingers, the flesh half-rotted from the journey back.

“Did he say anything before you slayed him?” he asked, casting the hand into the pond for the koi fish. I watched the swarm of fat orange and white scaled heads bob in and out of the water, their massive mouths puckering over the hand, dragging it down into the dark water.

I looked the monk in the eye. The humans always think you can’t look them in the eye when you’re lying.

“Not a word. I kept it painless, just as you requested,” I answered, listening to the splashing feast.

Akechi and I first met on a spring morning just like this one at a crumbling seaside town, the kind where the bedsheets feel salty and unwashed. Where the hot springs are hidden behind broken wooden gates, and the streets are fogged with enduring misery.

He had been hired to exorcise a cursed spirit from a woman who worked at one of the inns. A staff member had seen her speaking to a painting in one of the guest rooms. The woman’s husband had been trampled by horses two weeks earlier after falling asleep drunk on the road, and the staff believed his unhappy spirit had clung to her reflection, playing tricks on the other guests.

Akechi was done within the first two days. The famed curse tamer of Eikando Temple, I heard the staff whispering, half in awe, half in fear, as they washed the bloody sheets in the alley behind the inn. I found the monk cleaning the blood off his hands and tools in the river just outside of the town. Any hungrier beast would have devoured him then and there, but I had no interest in consuming someone whose skin was still stained with another’s cursed blood. It added a disgusting aftertaste.

“You’re not human,” he spoke, looking into the blood-smeared water, the scarlet trails dissipating like ink against the burbling current. He raised his dagger more like a doctor than a hunter. “Are you looking for a new master?”

I laughed. It had been so long since I’d met a human who didn’t shrink away at the true sight of me. Not since Ryunosuke.

“What could you do for me?” I asked, still smiling. I felt a rare tenderness toward this soft bag of overconfident meat and bones. “I am not in the habit of devouring those who cull my competition,” I said, motioning at the cursed blood in the river, “but I’ll gladly tear off your insolent mouth and feed it to one of the bears.”

“I am offering you an opportunity because of your skill,” he said, flicking the water off his blade and sheathing it back into its wooden scabbard. “Give me your name, and I will keep you alive.”

My hair billowed up, blood pooling into my fingers, nails sharpening into claws. There is a fine line between an amusing rodent and a pest. “You dare ask for my name, human?” I growled.

A trick of light, a rustle of bare branches in the spring breeze, a chipmunk scurrying in and out of a beam of afternoon sun. I reached down, the blade embedded in the ugly pouch between my stomach and throat. There was no blood, but I could not move, my body petrified. It shouldn’t have been possible. Was this Ryunosuke’s final curse on me?

“My blade does not kill. It simply binds you to me. A cursed contract,” the monk said, holding the handle of the blade with both hands as if ready to twist my insides. “But I have other weapons that could release you from this world. Do you wish to die or come with me?”

My hair fell back over my shoulders. A curse’s strength lies in its pride, but also its bottomless desire for vengeance. And I was not ready to die before I killed the monk myself.

I don’t know when I was born. If I’d replaced another girl, or if I’d simply devoured her waterlogged corpse by the river’s end along with fragments of her memories. I only remember the sound of water. The whisper of voices coming and going like rustling leaves. The gash of light under a closed door. The smell of lilies. The longing for warmth. The overwhelming hunger.

The humans have many names for us. Demon, devil, cursed creatures, the damned, but every curse has its own True Name. That name is a key, an invisible chain around our necks. To share that name is to hand those chains to a stranger.

Akechi stole mine with his binding blade and contract, but I had a different name once too. One that was my own, not belonging to her, that miserable girl who forfeited herself to the river. Ryunosuke gave it to me.

He said it was the name of a woman who had turned into a cursed serpent and burned to death under an iron bell after she’d fallen hopelessly in love with a monk who did not return her feelings.

I told him I’d make him eat his own liver if he continued calling me by that nonsense.

It was only long after Ryunosuke was gone, long after I told myself I’d forgotten the strange warmth of our time together, that I wandered into that broken seaside town, starved, looking for a dim-witted traveler to consume, and instead, found a painting of a woman with a serpent’s body hanging in one of the inns. The creature was enveloped in orange flames, but my gaze settled on her face, how serene it looked. She was beautiful, in that way all things are when they burn out.

Akechi had me do the jobs he was not interested in. False prophets, village leaders, novice assassins—tedious, messy jobs. Even miles from the temple, he knew the sharp pull of the contract would prevent me from trying to escape. So he sent me to Niigata, Kyoto, Yoshiwara, anywhere his clients paid him to go, sometimes as a warning, more often than not though, to kill and bring back evidence of the pathetic life I’d cut short. He preferred hands, claiming they were less conspicuous than heads. A dead body is all the same to me. Despite his warnings, I’d take small trinkets I liked too, beautiful things that seemed wasted on a corpse: a jade ring, golden bells, a silver pen from a foreign land, a silken scarf stored inside a straw bag that had avoided the splash of blood.

When I was not working, I was to stay in an old room stacked to the ceiling with handscroll sutras, away from the sun and the prying eyes of the monk’s sycophantic disciples and overly generous believers. I suspected it was soundproofed. The room was only accessible through a door in his study. I sometimes peered in when he was at work: the amber glow of his oil lamp, his eyes already on me the moment I found his silhouette in the dim light.

His study smelled of incense, star anise, and wet soil. Akechi wore a dark brown robe with an orange shawl draped over one shoulder down the length of his body. He was tall with broad shoulders and strong hands, a high forehead that the idiot humans celebrated as a sign of intelligence. The kind of man that was popular among both the human women and men. A part of me understood—I too would have loved to devour that torso, hands-first, then sip on strong rice wine from that skull.

I saw it then. The dagger tucked in its wooden scabbard, poorly concealed inside a lacquer box next to a statue of Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy. All I needed to do was slash his throat open or tear my claws through his gut, toss his flopping body to the side, and take the binding blade. No more enduring the humiliation of servitude to a human.

His hand was suddenly at the base of my throat. He didn’t squeeze, but I could feel my own pulse under his fingers.

“Our contract doesn’t just make you obey me in terms of taking others’ lives,” he said, his eyes tracing the curve of my neck down to the valley of my chest. “I know you cannot easily die, demon. But there are other ways a body loses meaning.”

His fingers released me, but I would not give him the satisfaction of gasping for air.

“Come now, you’re being more paranoid than usual,” I said with a smile, imagining how pretty he would look rearranged into smaller, bloody pieces. “Bad day?”

“Don’t waste your time with useless thoughts. The moment you touch the blade, our contract ends and your cursed life will end with it,” he said, returning to his desk and his writing.

There were stories, of course. Of demons who had successfully severed their cursed contracts by destroying the binding relic that held their true name prisoner. How they’d rapturously devoured their former masters soon after. But stories are just stories. I’d seen one dissolve into blue flames in the back alley of the Pleasure Quarters, the cracked binding relic by its burning feet. How the body burned in such beautiful colors that anyone peering into the alley might have imagined it a woman dancing in iridescent robes. How the scavenging doctors happily shoveled up the cursed ash afterwards to sell as cure-alls to gullible patients. Nothing in this world is fixed, luck and unluck two parts of the same coin, and I wouldn’t exactly call myself lucky. Akechi was a lying fool, but I was also not one to gamble with my own life.

“Am I supposed to stay here until someone else kills you then?” I asked, walking over to the shelf of books and sutras. Akechi didn’t mind if I touched his things, but there wasn’t a single item that could whet my appetite. There hadn’t been in so long. Was that the result of being a demon or simply being a creature that had lived for far too long? I would’ve been more sated by the look on his face as I burned this place to ground with him inside it.

“Even if I die, the contract terms are unbreakable,” Akechi answered, dipping his brush into the ink spool.

“Am I to follow you into the depths of hell then? Should I slaughter the king of the underworld for you as well? Or just the husbands of the women you wish you take to bed?” I said, smirking with satisfaction when he looked up from his documents with a dangerous gleam in his eye.

“Leave. Now,” he said, the tip of his brush dripping ink onto the table. “Before I forget why I keep you here.”

I kept a jar by me at all times, sang it songs tenderly at night like a sleeping infant. It was filled with precious things: centipedes, maggots, frenzied lice, and a beautiful baby viper I once found hidden in the brush by Arashiyama River at night.

There is only one way to cleanly sever a cursed contract. I learned this from a frog-faced exorcist in a Yoshiwara brothel. I saw him do it, the way he had the older staff hold the arms and legs down of a troublesome customer, how he then poured the contents of the kodoku jar into the person’s mouth, everyone’s heads turning away at the ghastly sight. A cursed contract can only be passed to another cursed spirit, and the fastest way to find a cursed spirit is to make one. A heart for a heart. A soul for a soul. A body remade bone by cursed bone.

I caressed the jar, running a long fingernail along the rim. It quivered, the creatures consuming each other, beautiful chaos unfolding inside.

“I know you’re up to something,” Akechi said, walking into my prison chamber as I pretended to read.

“If I am, it is your fault. I’m bored out of my mind,” I said, putting down the stone sutra and uncrossing my legs. My muscles felt impatient, rusting, like a water wheel abandoned in a dried-out stream.

“I have a new job for you. From the imperial guard,” he answered. “I want you to bring Arata along with you this time.”

“Who?” I asked. I’d already seen the latest batch of new disciples, smooth-faced and wide-eyed like startled infants. Which one was he referring to?

“Arata Watanabe,” he answered, his eyes trailing the shelves and tables as he always did, as if expecting to find evidence of some transgression. “He comes from a family of executioners, but he seeks penance.”

“If he holds me back, I might just devour him. And you will have another woman to apologize to.”

Akechi pulled a small scabbard from his sleeve. Rust-red engravings of centipedes and spiders curved up the lacquered wood, a black cicada made of stone clinging to the handle.

“I want you to kill him with this after you’re done with the job,” he said, handing me the blade.

“And what would be achieved by killing one of your own? Or have you truly lost your mind?” I asked, trying to hold back my grin, lips twitching. It was always a delight to watch the humans kill each other.

“Arata’s father requested this. He claims the boy acted treacherously, lusting after his new young wife. The boy’s mother is not a member of the Watanabe clan. Some claim she is a demon herself, another stain of shame for the clan. There is little to be lost in his execution.”

When does a woman go from being a prize to a stain? How many stains could a man collect before the filth finally tainted the soft skin below?

Akechi gripped my chin in his hand and tilted my head up so I had to look at him. “The boy is talented with a sword, but his mind is weak. Try your best to kill him painlessly. He is still my disciple.”

I jerked out of his grip, pulling the scabbard off the blade. The candle flames reflected in the smooth steel underneath like fire burning across a lake.

He had hair like silver rivers down his back and a face the humans would call handsome. But what struck me most was the overwhelming smell of other people’s blood, like a library of death on him. He was hired by the Emperor’s imperial guard as an assassin, their unofficial executioner. The rebellion soldiers whispered stories about him to new recruits like warnings of evil spirits. The one with snow-like hair who drenched the ground in crimson and then vanished. The one who slaughtered without hesitation. He was swift with a blade, his attacks clean and majestic, the twisting arch of his arms under his navy haori as he swung his katana, the spray of blood, the way the energy inside him pulsed like dark suns after the bodies fell. He was a work of art to witness.

Ryunosuke found me devouring one of the soldiers behind the Yoshiwara brothel where I’d taken up the girl’s identity. I’d been sloppy, too hungry. As he approached, I raised my claws, lips stained with blood. His blade was still sheathed, his hand on the hilt. He was overconfident, a delicious trait in a meal.

“I am not interested in your head,” he said, studying the body on the ground before looking back up at me, undeterred by the bloodthirst in my eyes. “I am just curious…about the taste.”

“The taste?” I asked, licking the blood from my lips. I raised the dead man’s left leg by the ankle. “Of this human?”

Ryunosuke nodded, his eyes tracing the fallen body again. “I’ve lived my whole life with death. Dedicated myself to it. Experienced it with all my senses. The loudness and quietness of it, the wet warmth of it, the stink of it, the pure colorlessness of it. Everything…except the taste.” His coin-like eyes shone under lantern light, meeting mine again. “What does death taste like?”

I laughed, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. How delightfully strange, this human who longed to be a demon.

“Why don’t you try some then?” I asked, tearing off some of the flesh from the soldier’s throat. “You may not survive your first time.” I held the bloody offering up to him with a grin. If he was going to kill me afterwards, I at least wanted a good show.

To my surprise, Ryunosuke got on his knees the way I’d seen some of the humans pray. He took me by the wrist, his hands warm, and brought my fingers to his lips.

“My name is Arata Watanabe,” he said, standing at the entrance to the garden, the morning sun searing against his back, his face inked in shadows. “I will be your escort to Jigokudani.”

My first thoughts went to the similarities: the luxurious kimono that only government officials or those who killed for them wore, the large scarred hands, his long hair tied up neatly behind him, a sheathed sword corded to his side, the eyes that lacked light. They were both beautiful in the way fires that burn down entire villages are.

He had the scent of an executioner on him—I’d been around Ryunosuke long enough to know that scent of blood that never completely washes off. It was different than the smell of oil and ink that the other pig-faced disciples stank of.

“Pleased to meet you,” I bowed gently, eyes on the cracked tiles under his feet, still wet from the earlier rain, unsure if I was allowed to speak. Men could get so easily riled up by small offenses.

The journey to Jigokudani was long and choked with dust. We wrapped our faces in too-thin scarves, our tongues still tasting the smog in the air.

It was nearly sundown by the time we arrived through the smoking gates of the town. The streets were alive with vendors peddling snacks, shiny trinkets, and embroidered silk robes. Tiny turtles swam in tiny glass tanks, ready to be drowned in medicinal jars.

The only inn in the town was connected to a windowless spa that offered everything a human body could want and more. In the wooden foyer, a young woman in a beautiful black-red kimono kneeled on a cushion, golden pins and carnations in her hair. Water spilled from a bamboo pipe into the small man-made pond. Another floating world. I wondered if Ryunosuke would have found her beautiful too. If he would’ve wanted her like so many of the men in this town. I squeezed the blade in my sleeve, tight enough that the stone cicada’s wings dug sharply into my skin.

“Shall we?” Arata asked, offering his hand. I could hear the clinking of glasses and laughter from inside, a foreign world. I crushed all other thoughts from my mind as we slipped out of our sandals and greeted the innkeeper as a married couple.

After our first meeting, Ryunosuke came to visit me at the brothel every night despite my threats to devour him. The other girls asked if he was as rough as he looked, was I scared of him, they’d giggle idiotically. He’d bring fruits and breads, tasteless offerings to a demon. I told him to bring me good wine next time or I’d have to drink the blood from his bones instead.

It was better than I expected, so I let him live. And the day after. And so we continued this until I began to wait by the barred windows each dusk, searching for the familiar crest on his navy haori among the crowds flanking the nightly procession of oiran on the streets. Until seeing him felt like breathing.

Ryunosuke longed for a greater understanding of death. Unlike the other humans who clamored for more time, more riches, more pleasure, he was obsessed with how a body ends. And what creature had a better understanding of death than a cursed body that had been forsaken by it?

A cursed spirit can live for centuries unchanged. We feed on the misery and regret of the land, on the creatures that inhabit and pillage it. In this way, we are a part of the cycle of life—nature’s executioner.

“Is it true that all demons were once human?” he asked one day, his blade next to him on the tatami mat. He’d been gone for several days, and I could smell the accents of new blood on him.

I snickered, sipping on the Sudo Honke sake he’d brought, watching the fluttering shadows of moths against the shoji screen windows. I’d heard the same story countless times from other humans, always those begging for their lives.

“You humans always clamor for meaning,” I said. “We demons seek human flesh because it tastes good. We have no grudge to settle, no nobler cause. Humans and demons are simply incompatible, so we kill each other. The moon assassinates the sun each evening when it demands the night, and the sun in turn incinerates the moon each dawn when it rises. And so it goes on and on.”

I gulped the last bit of the sake, feeling it burn deliciously down my throat. I didn’t tell him of the girl. Of locked rooms and the burn of probing strangers’ hands, the coldness of a memory without an identity left to anchor it.

“Then I have a different question,” he said. “Is it possible for a demon to love a human?”

My grip tightened around the narrow neck of the gourd. There was a childishness to his persistence that irritated me. Still, a part of me was curious too. What would it be like? To live an entire lifetime among the humans in peace? To have a name that no one could take away? To be free of this curse, this hunger, this unrelenting rage? What would it be like to die quietly and have someone tenderly bury my bones into the earth?

I tossed the empty sake gourd back to him, and he caught it one-handed. The other hand, less confident, reached for my wrist.

“But,” he said, a powdering of blush on his cheeks. “If a human can love a demon, don’t you think the opposite should be true?”

In the room, Arata undressed in front of me as if it was nothing. He climbed into the white futon, turning his back to me, but I could feel the heat from his body through the thin sheet. He knew nothing of who I was. There was a thrill in this one-sided knowledge. I imagined the shape of my hand around his throat, prying open his lips, my jar of precious things tumbling down into his gut. He would be beautiful in a skin of curses. We would be the same, except I would finally be free.

When I woke, Ryunosuke was sitting by the window, one hand on his knee, the other cupping his long face, elbow on the low tabletop, the slight smile on his face I’d seen countless times before. I opened my mouth to call to him, but when I blinked, Arata had already taken his place. Magic. A cruel trick of the brain. A family of sparrows fluttered by the glass, shaking snow free from their wings. Arata glanced over as if sensing my stare, but I closed my eyes, still as a statue.

“If you’re awake, we should leave for the Tower,” he said low enough that I knew he thought I was still sleeping. After a few minutes, I opened my eyes again, watching him watch the birds, waiting for another trick of the eye.

The dusty streets were nearly empty during the day, the sun grilling down. Rusted shop signs swung on their chains in the rough winds. A lone old man drank sake from a sun-bleached gourd, his spine curved down like a bent tree, oblivious to the sand in his hairy ears.

The Tower of Jigokudani lay on the west end of the small town, a vulgar black aberration in the flat sandy landscape. A self-proclaimed Oracle lived at the top, worshipped by the residents. With his third eye, he was responsible for everything from reading the weather and harvest cycles to designating the job of each person in the town when they turned sixteen.

The job from Akechi was straightforward. I was to climb to the top of the Tower and take the false Oracle’s life—chop off his long hair, pierce his heart with the monk’s divine blade, spill open his slippery guts, and toss him from the tower window as a warning to the people. A direct request from the Emperor who proclaimed the people should not worship a mere man, or at least not one who dared to question his authority.

“The third eye is a fake,” Arata confirmed, holding up the Oracle’s bloody torso, pressing his thumb to the old man’s forehead. Charcoal smeared on his finger. He tore open the old man’s white robe, revealing the black kimono underneath. Embroidered into the dead man’s sleeve was a three-claw crest inside a lotus flower, the imperial emblem.

“Why would one of the Emperor’s men be here?” I asked, but the answer was already clear.

The Emperor could not forgive a man with too much power, one who might question his authority. Including a treacherous monk with too many generous followers.

I could be as far as Shimane by sundown, but the cursed contract would pull me back. The monk could command me to prostrate myself in front of the Emperor’s marionette men. To do whatever they wanted until they were satisfied enough to look the other way. There were so many uses for a body that could not easily die, more than I cared to imagine.

I watched Arata as he stalked across the room to the window. He slid the shoji screen shut, the hall darkening. Most humans feel safer in the light, but some, not unlike demons, prefer the shadows.

“There is only one way to settle this,” he said, unsheathing his blade. He looked up at me with the narrowed eyes of an executioner.

I took a step back, hand on the scabbard of the blade Akechi gave me. My grip tightened around the handle, ready to parry any attack—the perfect angle could break his sword in two, sending the metal into his throat.

Arata raised his sword. With one clean motion, he sliced off the fake Oracle’s right hand.

“Put this in the jar you’ve brought with you,” he ordered, dropping the severed appendage on the table with the dead man’s teacup and stacked fortune cards. Blood stained across a diagram of the body laid out like a map of a human-shaped country to conquer.

He grabbed a hold of my arm as if to slice it off as well. “The one you’ve been keeping. The one Akechi gave you.”

“We’ll return with proof of the execution,” he said. “That was our only job, was it not? There is no reason for us not to feign ignorance about everything else.”

There are few places a demon can live among the humans, but they exist. These are the lush houses of pleasure and discretion where money is exchanged for time and relief. Where there is less concern for where a body comes from and more interest in how much it can take. These are the blood fields of war where the sharpness of a sword buys a man or demon another day. These are the places where the humans allow themselves to become demons. The places where a girl must become a curse to survive.

Here a man’s hands can open a girl up like a blade shucking open an oyster. Like the soft creature inside, she never even knows she has already begun the process of dying.

The first time I was taken from the only home I’d ever known to the Pleasure Quarters, I was no more than seventeen, and my existence was already a stain on someone else’s life. I had not even been afraid. There was so much beauty at first. The bejeweled hair pieces and thin-toothed combs, the racks of kimono, the porcelain teapots painted and glazed with ancient landscapes, the music each night, the generous curtain of sunshine each morning on my face. Sometimes you can surround yourself with enough beautiful things to forget how ugly the world is. Sometimes that is all you can do.

Arata played the kokyū in the Crane Sitting Room next to the inn’s hot springs-fed bathhouse. A group of elderly women gathered to listen, fanning themselves with paper uchiwa, still steaming from their baths, their husbands smoking outside or drinking hot sake in the tatami room. Everything in the foyer was covered in a thin layer of dust and sand, even with the doors closed.

Outside, the full moon bathed everything in a twilight blue glow, even the smoke pillars rising in the distance as men set fire to grass fields in hopes of alchemizing new soil from the ash.

In the Tower, just a few miles away at the edge of the town, the false Oracle was rotting in a pool of his own blood without a hand. We’d closed all the windows to prevent the crows from feasting, but the rats had likely started first pickings. The man’s imperial comrades and their weapons would make their way up those dark stairs soon after, if they hadn’t already.

I don’t tell Arata how the jar had begun to transform. How the serpent had wrapped itself into a scarlet-threaded cocoon made of the clotted blood from the hand, a divine-level curse imbued into its tar-black scales. I felt its rage surging in the pit of my gut. It spoke to me through its ceramic prison, singing back my old lullabies as if pleading for freedom.

Soon, soon. I promised the creature fresh meat for its first meal in exchange for its silence now.

I remember my own first meal well. A man from the girl’s memories who had cruel hands. It was in the back alley of the Pleasure Quarters. The taste of well-aged wine mixed with tones of mint and the man’s cigars. I remember the nausea. The way a body resists its first time in more meanings than one. For moment, I’d felt like I was dying again as I brought the man’s bones to my teeth, revenge never quite tasting the way you expect it to.

The strings petered out like rain dimming to a drizzle. The room grew quiet. Arata put down the kokyū’s horse-haired bow to hushed compliments and applause. He had the air of someone who knew how to fit in with common people, even if he would never be one of them. Even if he could cut down each one without hesitation. Like a god disguised as a human.

I followed him down the hall back to the room, the maple trees swaying in the relentless heat. I dabbed at my forehead with my sleeve, catching sight of Akechi’s blade inside. Some of the other guests stopped to watch us, to watch him. He took my hand, looking at me as if we were the only two people left in the inn, in Jigokudani, two fugitives at the end of the world. “You are beautiful,” he said as if putting on a show for our audience. “Let me free you from Akechi.”

Arata was dressed in his coal-black hakama and crested haori, an armored mask over his nose and mouth as if ready for an assassination.

The jar sat in the middle of the bed, its glazed colors reflecting the light of the moon.

I nodded, not wanting to hear my own voice. The inn had tired me out, the nonstop human interactions. The stink of the old inn’s tatami floor swarmed over all my senses, drowning me. For a moment I could see the old Pleasure Quarters, the stained sheets, the bruised women in beautiful clothes, the lamps burning in dark rooms like ghosts.

The town was dead quiet. Even the sparse lanterns on the streets had been snuffed out for the night, the whining crickets in the shadows our only company. In the dark, I could still taste the dust in the air.

The last time Ryunosuke left the brothel, it had been so quiet that I’d wondered if the whole town had died and finally left us in peace. I remember watching him from the window as he made his way through the streets to the entry gates, the morning mist blanketed across the shingled roofs, how I caught myself wearing the haori he had left behind. How it still smelled of him when I fell asleep with it on. How I’d wanted to tear it to shreds when I woke up alone hours later.

Hand in my sleeve, I gripped the handle of Akechi’s blade. The cicada-stone nestled between my index and middle finger, cold and hard against my pulse. Arata’s pace increased, his strides long, elegant as a deer, as we made our way past empty glass tanks and smoldering fire pits toward the beech forest spilling out from the west gate of the town.

In the distance, the sound of the river’s current echoed along the trees. My lungs burned with phantom water. A body never forgets how it leaves the world the first time, I suppose. A soul etched into the flesh. Some curses are not the ones you expect.

I stopped, listening to the throaty croaks of the toads in the misty path, the unearthly cries of raccoons.

Arata slowed, moonlight on the back of his haori, glossy against his black hair until it looked almost white. For a moment, I could see Ryunosuke in the profile of his face like a beautiful ghost.

I took one step forward, dead leaves splitting under my feet. I’d learned long ago that waiting for someone else to save you meant losing the opportunity to save yourself.

I lunged forward, throwing the scabbard past him. Arata eyes darted toward the flash of lacquer. My vision was swimming, tiny sprites at the edges of my eyes. I gripped the handle of the blade like a dagger, taking aim. All it would take was one sharp drive between the ribs to the beating wet muscle housed inside. The jar’s contents would slide down his throat before he died, before his body became an unusable vessel and useless to me. We would be back at the temple by dawn. I would barter my freedom with my new cursed vessel, a sharpened blade pressed to Akechi throat.

I coughed, spitting up blood. Pain seared through me like fire blooming across my flesh.

“Did Akechi order you to do this?” he asked, lowering his mask. He looked nothing like the man I had spent the past few days with, the veil of kindness gone from his eyes.

I refused to fall to my knees. I’d already spent so much time on the ground, far more than I would ever admit to a human. If I could buy enough time, I could heal this wound. I could devour him bones and all, I could—

“He doesn’t deserve you.” Arata suddenly gripped my chin. My body froze. I couldn’t feel my legs or arms, my limbs encased in invisible concrete.

He leaned forward and kissed my petrified lips, soft at first, and then deeply. My mouth opened, coaxed by whatever curse he had put on me. Something slid between my lips, warm and slippery. I fought the urge to gag as it slithered across my tongue, down my throat. Arata’s lips pressed harder against mine as the thing crawled down to my gut. It thrashed against my insides. I forced my eyes open and saw Arata’s gray ones staring right at me, grave-cold. On the ground by his feet, the jar was on its side, the lid open. Panic swelled in me. I willed my arms to move, but I could barely twitch a finger.

His hand and lips finally released me. I tried to raise the blade still in my hand, but it was no use. I felt depleted, boneless. As if I were drowning, again. Blood spilled from the wound in my chest. The thing inside me was growing, squirming, feeding on my strength.

“I was silent, just as you asked,” Arata said. “Now it is time for you to keep your promise. To the other side, to the other side…” he hummed cheerfully.

I told him I wanted to meet in the forest to avoid trouble with the brothel owner. But in truth, I wanted no witnesses.

Most cursed spirits are skilled at lying, but I could not move the right words from my chest to my tongue. “I don’t know,” I answered instead, an unfinished thought. What I wanted to say was: I don’t know what I’m becoming when you’re around. “Please leave. Otherwise, I will probably kill you.”

“Could you do it?” he said, not looking at me as he put his haori back on. “Would you finally feel strong enough then?” His hand was on the hilt of his sword. His eyes narrowed, a familiar cruelty on his smirking lips. “You will need to be if you want to stop me from doing what they sent me to do.”

At that moment, I remembered. He was still an assassin for the imperial guard. All this time we were just playing house. The world behind the walls of the Pleasure Quarters were no more real than the make-up we smeared onto our faces each morning, the carved masks the actors donned each night. It had been so long, I’d almost forgotten.

He pulled the blade out of his wooden scabbard. I laughed as he assumed the position of an executioner, sword raised.

Arata took the blade from my hand and held its sharp tip to my neck. The forest seemed to spin in dark blues, as if we were underwater.

“Just a piece of me. Nothing too serious. I’m still new and a little afraid of commitment,” he grinned. “I’d planned to take that monk’s body, but I wanted something to happen now. I was getting bored in there,” he motioned to the open jar. “So, I made an agreement with the boy instead.”

“Whatever you say. Anyways, he did not like the new boy. He wanted to get rid of him.”

Jealousy is a consequence of love. And love is a consequence of weakness. A blue-tailed lizard darted into view and then disappeared down a burrow. My vision blurred from the blood loss. I fought back the urge to vomit.

“He took over your body for just a moment. Just long enough to let me out. To let me crawl into my pretty new vessel while he slept,” the creature in Arata’s skin explained, leaning close enough to peer into my eyes as if I were the one inside a jar now. “The Watanabe family has a long history of demon hunting. Not my favorite clan. The taste of too much cursed blood on them makes them a rotten meal. I’m sure Arata or one of his spineless elders had already sensed you at the temple or during one of your jobs. He probably came to take your head under the guise of penance training. Under the guise of being friendly. Assassins really are the worst kind of executioners, don’t you think?”

“Sorry, all that time spent keeping my mouth shut and now I’ve just got too much to say,” he sighed. “Let’s go do something fun. Your contract with the monk is still in place, is it not? Akechi is overconfident, which means he will not give up so easily. And I know you cannot stand that look in his eyes, that look like he thinks he has already won.” He leaned in so close his lips grazed my ear. “How long have you been waiting to devour those eyes? Let me help you.”

My claws lashed out, barely missing his throat as he leapt back. My arm had moved on its own, compelled by phantom strings.

“So, the boy inside you breaks deals as easily as bones. Or perhaps you are his weakness. I can’t say I’m surprised or even disappointed. We both know how delicious betrayal can taste. But a body is a crowded place for two souls, isn’t it? Shall I pull him out of you and devour him piece by piece?” His grin widened. “Or will you do it yourself first?”

I was lying by the river. The sun was hot on my face, but my legs and arms were in the shade, cold and damp from the soil. Everything was sore from the fight. My mouth was wet, a sticky sweetness clinging to my tongue. I sat up and wiped my lips, the back of my hand staining dark red.

Several yards away, a bear was feeding behind a large stone. I walked over quietly, not wanting to start an unnecessary fight, but curious about what there was to eat.

Beneath the bear, obscured by its massive brown furred back, were two legs clothed in a bloody hakama, twitching in time to the bear’s feeding. Wet smacking sounds filled the air. Chewing sounds. Bones cracking. Nearby, a sword was abandoned near the water, unsheathed.

There’s a strangeness to a body without the glaring light of life in it, like an oversized sack of rice. I looked down at the thing on the ground, really looked at it. It was almost silly. Taking up so much space, all those limbs.

The bear looked up at me, its eyes consumed in purple flames. A cursed creature. Possibly the unfortunate test subject of a twisted curse wielder. Or perhaps it had simply consumed the bones of a cursed body left to rot in the forest.

I slashed the creature back with my claws. It howled, its bloody breath miasmic. I leapt back, noxious clouds ballooning around us. The creature’s paw lashed out behind me, three new bloody welts streaking across my back. Pain seared over my vision. My sandals sank into the dirt. I blinked once, twice, my eyes re-focusing, then sprang forward. Instinct sharpened my teeth and hair into messy slaughter tools. A cursed body is forged from misery. It is made to kill, to burn, to hate. My claws sank into flesh, tearing fur and skin off the creature’s throat. Blood splattered onto my cheeks and kimono. The bear fell back, stumbling over Ryunosuke’s body. It ground its jaws, chewing on something still in its maw. Someone. A human that had once belonged to me. I grabbed the creature’s jaw. Rage splintered my vision now. Ryunosuke had been mine. My eyes flitted over toward the lifeless bloodied body on the ground, the one I’d torn to shreds with my own hands. This is what I had wanted wasn’t it? To be free of him? To be alone. A cursed body can only kill, burn, and hate. Isn’t that what I had told him? The creature roared against my grip. With a clenched fist, I sent my cursed flames into its open mouth. They exploded in purples and then charcoaled to black. The creature stilled, crumbling to the ground.

Behind the crackling flames, Ryunosuke’s body was still dressed in the haori he always wore. What remained of it anyway after the bear had torn through the smooth fabric. My hands still felt sticky as I pulled the body up. I tried to remember his face, but all I could picture was the slaughter, the calmness of his face as it happened. I wanted to ask him why he’d raised his sword to me with no intention to kill. Why hadn’t he stopped me? Where was his pride?

But a corpse has no answers for the living. At least he would finally know the true meaning of death. Wasn’t that what he’d always desired most?

I wiped the creature’s blood that had splattered onto my face. It mixed with the blood that was still on my hands, smearing across my lips.

An unfamiliar ache pulled on my chest. A feeling like sinking into a black sea. I swallowed back the copperish taste in my throat, but the feeling did not wash down with it.

Inside the bloody mess, something gleamed wet and red under the morning sun like a petaled flower after the rain. Another beautiful thing left behind.

Ryunosuke’s heart was miraculously intact. I reached in and tore it free from its useless cage. All these bones and tendons. A body was nothing but a cage. I brought the heart to my lips. It was still warm. Was this how it felt to kiss a human?

I’d heard tales of consuming a soul, of obliterating a soul, but nothing of saving one to another body through consumption of the flesh.

“Will this violence please you enough to forget about him?” He laughed as I lifted him off the ground. The strands of hair tightened around his chest, his ribs on the verge of snapping, but he didn’t even flinch. He looked me in the eye as if he were delighted. Like a madman staring at a house he’d set alight. “Or are you that desperate to die?”

Pain ripped through me. Arata’s sword swung back through the air as if wielded by the wind and sank into my arm again. Warm blood trickled down my elbows to my hands. My grip weakened, my hair dropping him back to the ground.

Arata brushed the black strands off his kimono coat, watching me sink to the dirt. “What could a cursed spirit want more than power and revenge?” he asked, standing over me. “Or have you truly relinquished your pride to that human inside you?”

I raised my left hand, pain still throbbing through me like lava in my veins. For a moment, I felt the phantom welts on my face. The roaming hands of strangers on my body. The beautiful things that remained among the ruins. Pride was an armor I’d earned through blood. But when had it actually protected me?

Arata frowned, almost with pity. “Come now. It’s time for us to feast on a treacherous monk.”

He was right. I’d wanted vengeance so badly for so long. Hadn’t I pictured it each night, dragging Akechi into that soundproofed room he kept me in, of all the ways I’d make him hurt?

But there are so many hours in a night, and a demon doesn’t need much sleep. When the fog of anger settled, I was no longer in that temple. I was in the dark alleys again, with the crying women, on the dirty beds, in the locked rooms, a gash of light always just out of reach, a misery so deep it had no name.

I thought again of myself devouring that stranger in the alley behind the brothel, the blood covering my tattered kimono and face, the face of a monster.

I thought of Ryunosuke’s back, how he’d never taken off his haori until the night I asked to see the scars on his body. How he was the only man who never asked me to open my body to him as if it were an honor.

“I never understood why Kiyohime had been turned into a curse just because she’d loved the wrong person,” he’d said like a fool.

“She should have just devoured the monk and gone to live a peaceful life in the mountains,” I replied, lingering on the smile on his face.

Hadn’t I just wanted to be rid of him? Hadn’t his existence been like a curse on me?

“It will be a bit messy. But isn’t impossible,” he answered, the smile playing on his lips again. “If you are willing to make a sacrifice.”

Akechi sat in the garden in front of the wilting tulips, sketching a sparrow perched on a browned petal. Beside him, gold-speckled koi fish flicked their monstrously long tails over the surface of the pond.

“Did he say anything before you slayed him?” he asked, imbuing an energy border around the rotting specimen.

“What poor unsuspecting idiot is it this time?” I asked, peering over the pond. The cluster of white-orange koi scattered into deeper water at the sight of me. When I looked back up, Akechi’s face was close enough I could see the long scar on his neck, the flint color of his irises.

“You’ve lied to me,” he said, lowering his head just enough so our eyes were on the same level. “Arata is alive.” He stepped back and picked up the hand from the stone, glancing back at me as if I were a guilty human child, stolen sweets hidden behind my back. “How did you convince him to give you his sword-wielding hand?”

“Oho, so you plan to use my own weapon against me?” he said, unsheathing the binding blade from under his orange shawl. “Very well, I will enjoy you for a bit, and then end your long suffering.”

Our blades clashed, divine steel against divine steel. The monk had not earned his position and power through appearance and words alone. Steel grazed my scalp and sliced across the thick shoulder of my kimono, drawing blood. Koi fish gathered by the edge of the pond as if expecting treats. My muscles strained, still drained from my earlier battle with the demon in Arata’s body. Akechi fought with his eyes closed, one hand behind him as if relaxing to music. Insolent creature. I took a step back, aiming my blade at his throat.

His mouth suddenly dropped open, unfamiliar words spilling from his lips in rapid succession. A cursed incantation.

The cicada on the handle of my blade fluttered to life, translucent wings batting against my fingers. It flew up, landing on my left eye. I jerked away, but it wouldn’t move, blocking my vision. The centipede slithered to life next, down the hilt, sliding up my wrist and arm, up my neck and curled around my ear.

“The soldiers always say that a demon smells worse than the rotted flesh of their dead comrades, but I disagree,” he said, lowering his head and taking a deep breath against my neck. “I’ve always thought you smelled like a river, like the sea. That wonderful aroma of something that takes everything that pours into it.”

My body moved on its own, grabbing a hold of the monk’s head. Two hands pulled by phantom strings. I leaned in, pressing my lips into his. The monk struggled, his dried lips squirming against mine. I opened my mouth, my tongue like a blade forcing his open, the creature sliding up my gut and my throat. It crawled into my mouth and then squirmed into his. A copperish, slimy taste. A curse looking for a new home. His body thrashed, but my hands, our hands, held tightly onto his head, claws grazing his scalp and ears. Akechi choked, the wet sounds of drowning as the creature pressed down into his throat, seeking warmth.

I wanted to ask him if he really understood how many ways a body could lose meaning.

The afternoon light was a heaven-like gash in the forest canopy. The river rushed from the previous night’s rain, the smell of blood washed away by lush greenery. For a moment, I imagined myself as neither human nor demon, but as a songbird perched on a high branch, ready to alchemize the air in my lungs into music instead of fire.

Dead leaves crunched behind me. Arata walked into the clearing, his right hand wrapped in blood-stained fabric and bandages.

No, the cursed spirit had kept its promise, just as I had kept mine. It had no use for its former, damaged vessel.

Ryunosuke had walked into the clearing in the body of a stranger. He looked dazed, like the face of a newborn calf peering out from the darkness of its shed for the first time. His eyes moved from the burbling river to a fallen tree wrapped in wet moss to a weedish patch of wildflowers until they settled on me. His remaining hand reached for the sword corded to his side. Did he want revenge for what I’d done to him? I sharpened my fingers into claws, released my hair into a violent curtain of black. My eyes pooled into reds and purples. So be it. This is what I was, a demon, a curse, and I would devour him again if I had to.

“Kiyo,” he called, taking a step forward. The name sounded familiar, warm on his lips.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” I asked even though I already knew the answer. It had always been the same.

“I have no reason to be,” he said. “I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me.”

“They’ll hunt us until the end. Burn us. As cursed spirits, demons, monsters,” I said. “Until there’s nothing left of us but ash.”

“Let them come,” he said, the afternoon light like a torch against his face. “Death was always a price I was willing to pay to stay with you.”

(Editors’ Note: Angela Liu is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

Angela Liu is a Nebula-, Ignyte-, and Rhysling-nominated writer/poet from NYC who writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. She formerly researched mixed reality storytelling at Keio University in Japan. Her stories and poetry are published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Interzone Digital, Lightspeed, khōréō, and Logic(s), among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela.

Another Girl Under the Iron Bell