SNATCHED
I walked a brisk pace through the streets. The sun had descended ten degrees since noon, which meant I was running behind schedule. I should have been left the village by now, but of course I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I just had to get involved. Now look at the time. The sun was up there mocking my pace as it dipped lower in the sky.
Not only that, but the streets were annoyingly congested at this time of day. Everybody and their mommas were out doing their afternoon errands before they shut themselves in their houses for the night when the demons were stronger and more active. If the demons ever broke through the village gate, it was always better to be inside, behind the doors of your warded home, as a second line of defense. Which was why my dumb ass needed to stop playing around and get myself on home.
A guard waved at me as I approached the large wooden gate of the village. I remembered a time when the village didn’t have walls, or guards, and the demon threat was a concern for someone else on the other side of the island. I recognized the guard’s face as I came closer. Always annoyingly chatty, but he must be the reliable sort since he’s been assigned to the gate for a few months now. I didn’t really have the time to slow down and entertain his idle chit-chat. I gave him a brief acknowledging nod and continued past him through the open gates.
“Sistah Samurai!” The guard yelled.
I heard the slap of his wooden zoris running after me. I should have kept going, but the guards rarely had the courage to venture outside the gates, and the curiosity of it all had me pausing in my tracks. I glanced over my shoulder and narrowed my eyes at the interloper. He better not waste my time.
The guard nervously ran a hand over the top of his fade, with a spiral leaf symbol shaved into the sides. “One of your friends came through the gate earlier. Think she was another one of you. A Sistah Samurai.”
A buzz sounded in my ear, fading in and out of volume.
“Ex-cuse you?” I demanded, not liking this joke at all. That was impossible. I counted all the headbands. I hunted down the clan ledger. I searched for other survivors and found none. I was the last Sistah Samurai left.
My mind raced with thoughts. Perhaps it was another samurai from a different clan? There were a few of those still running around, but more than likely, someone was masquerading as someone they shouldn’t. After all, a lot of relics and personal effects had been stolen from the capital. I severed quite a few hands of those graveyard thieves myself.
In the corner of my eye, I swear something moved. I looked behind me, but my shadow was still there, and I glared at it reproachfully. Stay.
“I don’t know for sure,” the guard said, with a loud gulp. “She didn’t have your signature blades, or your headband, or any of the clan seals, but there was something about her, you know? The way she carried herself that was a bit like you. She never claimed to be a samurai, but I was just making conversation and asked if she knew you, is all. She seemed to think so and said she’d be looking for you. Don’t know if she found you or not, but just in case she’s not a friendly . . . I thought I’d give you a heads-up.”
“I appreciate the warning,” I said sincerely. I would rather know what was coming than not. “No, she didn’t find me. I don’t have the time to worry about that right now, but if she’s still in the village tomorrow, I’ll check it out. Thank you for letting me know.”
“No problem, Sistah—” The overwhelming sound of rapid-fire bursts disrupted his words.
The sound snapped me into motion, and I swiveled behind a tree to avoid the attack. I peeked from behind the pine trunk. The guard’s body quake stiltedly, battered by projectiles from behind, while his face was stuck in a tengu mask of horror.
The village bells clanged. The guards along the walls shouted and the village gate closed. They activated the talismans, which glowed a dull gold atop the watch towers.
After what seemed an eternity, the guard crumpled forward, and his corpse landed face-first into the road dust. The ensuing silence ached. I squinted past the space the young guard had briefly occupied toward the shadowed figure crouched in the bushes on the other side of the road. That mysterious figure emerged from the dappled shade into the sunlight.
A ripped cowboy hat shaded the upper half of the demon’s face. They say that demons are creatures made from the discarded parts of multiple worlds. I could almost believe it—looking at the result of someone shoving piranha teeth onto an ugly clay marionette. I’ve seen this particular kind before. It had a name in the bestiary: The White Demon.
The demon and I glanced at each other, and then at the fallen pockmarked corpse of the guard.
When you die, your soul is released from your mortal coil to transition to the hereafter. But it didn’t do so immediately. Funerary rites were important to help speed a soul’s transition, but some souls lingered or lost their way. Sometimes, they inhabited rivers and trees. Most often, a demon got there first.
The demon pounced, propelled into the air on all fours like a jumping spider. It landed atop the guard’s body and a mouth of a hundred teeth yawned open. The guard’s body began glowing gold, shimmering ephemeral spots in my vision, as the demon sucked out his soul.
So many of the souls that were consumed by demons would never know peace, including the souls of my Sistahs. I carried that fact on my shoulders every day, and to watch that demon straddle that corpse—I was already moving before I was aware of it.
I circled my katana overhead and brought it down with my whole body behind it. The demon pounced away; quicker than my eyes could follow. The cowboy hat, sliced in half, fluttered to the ground in seesawing arcs. It landed atop the guard’s arm, still glowing gold, meaning the soul was still attached to the guard’s body.
The demon landed a few paces away on its hindlegs. Without its hat, the damned thing had no eyes and no nose. Just a white face with wickedly sharp teeth. Grinning that stupid, placid smile at me. Then the demon flung its shawl aside to reveal a giant machine gun.
Shit.
I scooped the guard’s body over my shoulder and raced out of the way of the bullets. They pinged and followed at my heels, creating a trench in the ground behind me. I vaulted behind a nearby boulder and pressed my back against the stone as the bullets chewed into the granite. A bullet shot through my afro poking out above the stone, and I frowned at the smell of burnt hair.
The click click click of the machine gun slowed.
I slapped a talisman to the flat of my blade. Leaving behind the corpse, I hurdled the boulder and a rushing river sprouted from my katana. The demon was so fast, it left behind a double image for me to slash through. I whirled, WATER spouting around me like a cyclone, and the wide attack clipped the demon’s shoulder.
The demon slugged that large machine gun like a massive metal club. Not much space to do anything but duck or avoid it. I backed up, and the still-hot barrel brushed across the cotton of my kimono, catching on the inside fold, and pressing hot into my shoulder. I shoulder-leaned out of the way, but the move shifted my center of gravity. I followed the momentum, changing my weight to my back foot and front-kicked the demon’s face in.
The demon drifted back with a blur. Its creepy smile grew wider to split its blank face in half. Then the demon’s left arm shot toward me, elastic like dough, stretching impossibly across the distance.
I dropped my leg forward and slashed, throwing all my power behind the downward stroke. Water spray hit my face and the pale rubbery limb flopped to the ground. It squeaked when I stepped atop it with satisfaction, but the demon only tilted its eerie white face and proceeded to regenerate the severed flesh into another fully tactile limb.
Before it could finish, I charged.
The demon brought up the machine gun to block my attack. I raised my katana and, with additional intention, brought the force of a hurricane down atop its head. The gun shattered. I sliced through the demon’s soft flesh, cleaving it in half. The ensuing deluge of guts and water flooded the pine forest beyond.
The exhausted talisman peeled off my katana and wadded to the ground.
Both pieces of the demon’s corpse began to disintegrate, and the freed souls burst forth from the demon’s remains in an upward cascade of gold, fluttering through the air like a bright cloud of fireflies. All the souls that the demon had once consumed and which had kept it anchored to this world, were finally free.
I wondered if some of those souls belonged to my Sistahs. I could imagine the words they had to say to me: wondering why I hadn’t been there to defend them, questioning my word and my honor, and demanding why I didn’t free them sooner.
That fucking factory bodyguard was right.
I had abandoned them. And I was still abandoning them. I should be doing far more to honor their memory. I should be carving a path of vengeance through demon-kind. I should be hunting all these motherfuckers down and freeing as many souls as I could but . . . I didn’t have the time.
I kicked at the smoking machine gun. A sudden gust carried the tattered half of the cowboy hat off into the sky. The demons always leave something behind, whether it be something foreign or strange, or something as familiar as grief.
I cleaned my katana of the demon’s blue blood and sheathed my sword to the cheers and hollers from the guards watching atop the wall. From one of the towers, a flutter of white and gold floated down to my side of the road like some graceful crane. It was that same Brotha Monk that I met earlier today.
He raced past me to the corpse hidden behind the boulder. Without pause, he bowed to his knees and began performing the funerary rites. I stood at his back, watching the road and tree line for any more demons that might be attracted to the recently deceased soul.
I shook my head, thinking of how that young guard had been killed so abruptly and so violently. Poor boy probably didn’t think today would be his last. We never do. I wished I had talked to him more. I wished I had bothered to respond after all the times he asked about my day. I wished I had inquired after his name instead of learning it for the first time now, as the Brotha Monk repeated it over and over again as part of the funerary mantra. Names have power when you acknowledge them.
I had been the one to say the names of my Sistahs over their corpses until my voice grew hoarse, even though I knew there had been no souls to appease. By the time I arrived in the capital, their souls had already been devoured, stolen away by cruel demons that now prowled the roadsides. But I said their names anyway.
I said their names before I went to bed and again when I woke up. I said their names when I ate, when I bathed, when I walked, when I marched, when I sang, and when I sat in silence. I didn’t have the time to avenge them, but the least I could do was carry them.
To everyone else, they were just fallen cherry blossoms crushed underfoot.
But to me, they were my garden.
A garden now empty, and withered, and devoid of color. And no matter how much pain I tilled raw, or how much guilt I planted into the soil, or how much I watered their names again and again and again—
I feared we’d never be free.