With my right hand still gripping the centipede’s neck, I bashed the vile creature once more in the face with the ladle and then threw the tool away. With my left I grasped one of the feelers that were groping at my eyes and yanked as hard as I could.
The thing squealed and thrashed, and sharp claws tore at my neck, but the head reared back in panic, and I had the few seconds I needed.
Fumbling blindly along the edge of the platform, again with my left hand, I felt it—something cold and slim and sharp.
I came close to slicing my own fingers off, but in two more seconds I had the handle of a heavy knife in my hand, and I stabbed with all my strength.
The knife slid harmlessly off the centipede’s slippery carapace, and its head plunged down toward my face again.
I wrestled the head back with both hands, fumbling with the knife and nearly dropping it. While I struggled to get a firmer grip on the blade’s handle without letting go of the creature’s neck, it writhed a coil of its long body around my chest. I felt it suddenly cinch tight.
My breath burst out from between my lips. My ribs creaked.
Would it crush me first? Or would its fangs be in my neck while there was still breath in my lungs?
Don’t hack blindly. That’s for samurai on horseback. One thrust is enough for a ninja. Plan your attack. Know your target.
The thing’s armor was too tough for anything but an axe. What did that leave? The most vulnerable parts of any creature—eyes, ears, mouth.
The centipede’s mouth gaped. Grayish froth sizzled and dripped from its fangs into my face, stinging where it touched.
I found a good grip on the knife and thrust it with all the strength of my arm and shoulder straight into the demon’s mouth.
Thick, white fluid from the wound splashed over my arm to the elbow. The centipede screeched and flailed, and my head hit the platform hard enough that dark stars burst across my vision. But then the creature flopped down on top of me, shuddered all along its length, and lay horribly, heavily still.
I shuddered, too, and fought free of its coils, shoving and kicking them away, then crawled up to the cook’s platform, out of the mud, gripping the knife tightly. There I took stock of myself.
My clothes had protected me from the worst of the creature’s claws. The scratches across my stomach and neck were the deepest, but even they would stop bleeding soon on their own. I’d have a bruise on my temple and a sore shoulder from hitting the platform. But I was still strong enough to fight, and that was what mattered.
My face was stinging where the demon’s foamy saliva had dripped. I scrubbed at the sore spots with my sleeve and felt my shivering start to ease.
That had been no ordinary creature. It was something from the shadows, from the hidden places of the world. Something unnatural. Something changed.
A bakemono. A demon.
Of course I’d known there were demons in the world. But I’d never expected to meet one in the kitchen.
I’d never expected to meet a tengu in the forest, either.
Why? Why was all this happening now?
Never mind why. That was not the most urgent question.
What I really needed to know was: were there more?
I listened, but I could hear nothing except my own ragged, juddering breath. That would never do. I closed my eyes and deliberately let the tension in my shoulders ease. Three counts to breathe in. Five to breathe out. Again. Five to breathe in, seven to breathe out.
Listen.
A faint, fragile chime rang out. Tiny bells had been gently shaken. The sound rippled through the dark and empty rooms.
Something was in the house.
Something was on the stairs. Going up? Going down? Did it matter?
“What’s happening?” asked a tentative, sleepy voice. “Is everything—”
I barreled past Ichiro where he stood in the doorway to the main room, very nearly knocking him sprawling, and took the stairs two at a time. I didn’t skip the creaking sixth step. The more noise, the better.
“Wake up!” I bellowed.
Someone was already at the top of the stairs. I lifted my knife, but lowered it when I heard Masako’s voice. “What was all the noise in the kitchen?” she asked, worried. “And I heard the bells. Kata, did you—”
I felt for the thin black thread. It had been broken. Each piece, strung with bells, hung limply from a nail.
“No, I didn’t,” I answered grimly. “Someone’s in the house.”
“Quiet, all of you!” Masako said sharply to the younger girls, who were crowding around.
We listened, twenty-six ears straining in the darkness.
“There’s nothing.” Fuku’s voice came from the shadows on my left.
“Nothing didn’t break the bell thread.” Masako’s hair whispered as she shook her head.
“Kata probably did.”
“What’s happening? Kata?” Ichiro was behind me on the stairs.
“You don’t think I’d know if I broke a bell thread?” I growled at Fuku. My brain hurt from the effort of listening. With all this chatter, how could anyone hear the enemy?
“I don’t think you’d admit it.”
“What’s happening?” Ichiro insisted.
“Nothing.” Fuku was scornful. “Nothing is happening.”
“Where’s the instructor? Where’s Huge?” Masako demanded. Everyone fell silent.
The bell thread had rung. I’d fought a giant centipede in the kitchen. Everyone in the house was awake.
I turned slowly to face the foot of the stairs.
Everyone was awake—except that still figure huddled by the fire.
It seemed to be up to me. All the girls, and Ichiro, too, stood and watched as I made my way slowly, reluctantly, down.
I skirted the dark lump on the mat, approached the hearth from the other side, grabbed a poker, and jabbed the flames into life.
My shoulders sagged with relief.
“He’s not here.” I looked up at the apprehensive faces on the stairs. “It’s just his quilt. He’s gone.”
“Gone?” Masako started down, Ozu clinging to her hand. “He left? Why would he leave?”
“The door’s still locked,” Kazuko pointed out as the girls and Ichiro trooped down behind Masako, Saiko bringing up the rear. “Unless he went out through the kitchen.”
“He wasn’t upstairs,” Aki said.
“Not upstairs,” Okiko repeated, nodding.
“Is he in the classroom?” Kiku looked that way but didn’t move to check.
I stepped away from the fire. Gingerly, I used the tip of the poker to lift the crumpled pile of silk from the mat underneath.
“No,” I said. “He’s not in the classroom.” Or upstairs. Or outside. Somehow I was quite sure that The Boulder was not anywhere in this world, not anymore.
Everyone stared down at the mat, at the dark splotch as large as a man—a big man—that had been revealed when I lifted the quilt. Ichiro drew in a slow breath.
“We’ll search the house.” Masako’s voice was firm, and it seemed to shake us all out of a daze. “We’ll need light first. Kiku, Tomiko. Get lanterns lit. Stay together. No one is to go anywhere alone. Fuku, don’t argue.”
Miraculously, they did it. Even Fuku kept her mouth shut while Kiku and Tomiko hurried to get the lanterns off their shelf and light them at the fire. In the pale light glowing through the rice paper, faces were revealed: Fuku, nervous and restless; little Ozu, holding tight to Masako’s hand; the twins Aki and Okiko, together as always, trading quick glances as if talking without words; Yuki, alert but not panicked; Kazuko, bouncing on the balls of her feet; Masako, sharp-eyed and watchful.
All of them took in the sight of me.
“Kata. What …” Masako whispered.
I cut her off. “When we get to the kitchen, you’ll see.”
Masako wanted to ask more, but she bit her questions back when I shook my head.
“Kiku, Tomiko, go with Yuki and check the rooms upstairs,” she said briskly instead. “Fuku and Oichi, with me. Saiko, too. We’ll look in the classroom. Kata, inspect the windows and the door here. Take Aki and Okiko. Kazuko, stay on the stairs. You’ll be a messenger if we need one. Ozu, of course you stay with me.”
For half a second I bristled—who was Masako to order me about, as if I were Ozu’s age? But I had no fault to find with her plan, and we had no time to waste on arguing.
“What about me?” Ichiro asked meekly.
Masako looked baffled. What should we do with him—our tame hostage, our unwitting prisoner?
“Oh, come with me,” I grumbled.
It didn’t take long for us to check the house and gather back in the main room to report. The dormitories and the hallway upstairs: nothing. The wing with the classroom: nothing. The main room: nothing. The secret room under the stairs where we’d stowed Ichiro was empty. The screens on the windows were unbroken.
Then I led the way into the kitchen.
Nothing there, either. Except, of course, an upended pot of soup and the corpse of a centipede demon.
Everyone wanted an explanation, but I cut them off until the search was over. At last there was only one place left to look: Madame’s own chamber.
We gathered together back in the main chamber and stood before her door. I gripped my knife tightly, feeling that I’d rather face a troop of mounted samurai, or another flesh-eating demon, than go into that room unbidden. It wasn’t even locked. Of course it wasn’t locked. The kitchen might need defending, but Madame’s room? Our fear of her was a barrier better than any lock or bar.
It was Yuki who gently pushed the door open, looked back over her shoulder at us, and stepped inside. Fuku flicked a glance at me and followed. The rest of us crowded in.
No one was hiding in Madame’s cupboards or beneath her low desk or under the cushions that lay on her floor. The window screens were smooth and undamaged, the shutters latched. My skin prickled the whole time, but that was merely from imagining what Madame would say if she found we’d been in her room without her permission.
Yuki knelt before a chest much too small to hide a person, and before I could protest, slipped it open.
“What are you doing?” Masako whispered, alarmed.
Mutely, Yuki showed her what she had taken out—rolls of bandages and several small ceramic jars with tight-fitting lids.
“Well—in the other room, then,” I told her. Medical supplies, the ones Madame kept in her room to treat training injuries. We might need them tonight, certainly. But I felt better when Yuki had closed the chest and we were all clustered around the hearth in the main room.
“Nothing. I said.” Fuku was trying to sound disdainful, but her gaze kept skittering toward The Boulder’s mat.
“What’s in the kitchen is not nothing,” Masako countered. “And something happened to—” Her gaze dropped to the mat as well. “To him.”
Yuki had knelt beside me and was smearing a greasy paste from one of her little jars over the scratches on my stomach and neck.
“He probably just ran away,” Fuku grumbled.
“And bled all over his mat?” Masako countered. “And locked the door behind himself?”
With a hand on my chin, Yuki turned my head gently to one side, squinting at my face. Then she took another little jar and rubbed its contents over my cheek. I hadn’t realized how much it was stinging until it stopped.
“Kata could have locked the door, and—” Fuku stopped mid-sentence as I pushed Yuki’s hand away and got to my feet.
“She didn’t. And the instructor didn’t just run.” Saiko sounded certain. All eyes, even mine and Fuku’s, turned toward her. Ichiro nodded.
“What do you mean?” Masako asked.
“What do you know?” My right hand, still holding the kitchen knife, twitched. “The two of you—”
The flames of every lantern blew out.
The darkness closed in. Our eyes had adjusted to the lantern light, and our night vision was gone. All I could see was the dimmed glow of the hearth.
“No one move.” It was Masako’s voice. On her knees by the hearth, she was using the poker to stir the coals into life. Faces sprang out of the darkness—startled, worried, alert, afraid. “There, now we can see. Hand those lanterns to me. Quickly.”
The shutters rattled.
It wasn’t wind. That would have stirred the trees outside as well. But the leaves were silent.
Something else was shaking the wooden shutters. Something was trying to lift the latches.
“Weapons.” Masako’s voice was low but clear. “Kata, Aki, Okiko. Go.”
I snatched up a lantern and lit it at the hearth, charring one of the paper screens in my hurry. Then, with the twins on my heels, I dashed for the kitchen. No one wasted breath on words.
Through the kitchen, skidding in mud, leaping over the demon’s corpse. Into the storeroom, piled high with bags of rice and millet, barrels of salted fish, baskets of radishes and eggplant. I seized hold of a section of wall, hooked my fingers in a knothole, and pulled. The wall slid aside.
A storeroom of a different type lay beyond.
I began tossing weapons back to Aki and Okiko. Staffs. Swords. Shuko for close fighting. No throwing knives; the house was too small. We’d be in danger of hitting each other. I kept a short wakizashi blade for myself.
Back to the main room. Masako had the rest of the lanterns lit again. No sound came from the windows. The squares of rice paper were white and blank in their frames.
Quickly, Masako dispatched her tiny army—Aki and Okiko to the top of the stairs, where they could listen for any signs of intrusion on the second floor. Kiku with Masako herself to Madame’s room. Kiku let out a little whimper at the idea of intruding on that shrine once more, but there was another wide, shuttered window there, another point of attack.
Tomiko and Kazuko to the classroom. Fuku and Oichi to the kitchen, to watch the outside door. “And the drain!” I called out after them.
Yuki and me in the main room. “And Saiko,” Masako ordered.
I shook my head. “Take her with you.”
“You might need—”
“I don’t want her at my back!”
Masako nodded after one glance at my face. “Saiko, with me. What’s your name—Ichiro? You look after Ozu.”
“I can fight!” Ichiro looked indignant. When girls his own age were drawing swords and strapping clawed shuko over their knuckles, being a nursemaid was a lot for the Kashihara heir to swallow.
“You may have to.” Masako threw him a sword, which he caught deftly enough in a hand that I noticed had been neatly bandaged. “But for now I don’t know how to use you. Ozu, be brave, pet—you know how. Scatter, girls!”
At every point of entry, we waited.
Nothing happened.
I shifted my grip on my sword’s hilt, rolled my shoulders to keep them loose, and waited.
Nothing happened.
Eyes on the window. Breathing soundlessly. Ears not strained, but alert.
Without looking, I could feel Yuki beside me. She was best at herbs and medicines and potions, but she could still handle the staff she’d chosen as a weapon. If I had my choice, I’d pick her to slip poison into a cup rather than to have at my back in a melee, but she would do.
Ichiro had pulled Ozu over by the staircase, out of the line of sight from the window. The shutter outside creaked.
Of course Madame would make sure that all her shutters creaked. Anyone coming into this house would not do so in silence.
Something poked through the screen.
It was thin and black and it didn’t poke far. Just enough to pull downward, slitting the rice paper as it went.
I held up a hand to Yuki, pointed at myself. She nodded.
The sharp black thing reached through the slit it had made. It was—I did not know what it was. A long, gnarled, knobbed, clawed finger? It grew and stretched like a root. It flexed like a snake.
I stepped silently nearer, raised my sword, and sliced it off.
The blood that spurted out was smoking hot, and the scream from outside roiled my guts and nearly made my eardrums bleed. And then five—ten—a dozen of those fingers punctured the screen, and Yuki was beside me, swinging her staff overhead and slamming it down as I sliced and stabbed.
Fuku shouted from the kitchen. “The door! Brace it!”
The paper of the screen before me was in shreds, but still I could not see much of what was outside. The firelight glinted off a handful of smooth scales. I hacked off a clump of matted, stinking fur.
Ozu shrieked.
I whirled to see something swooping down from the second floor on wide wings knitted out of cobwebs and midnight. At the bottom of the stairs, Ozu and Ichiro ducked as the thing stretched out sleek black talons, talons that might have snagged a bell thread not so long ago.
Hot breath as foul as the grave rolled over me, making me gag, and wrenching my attention back to my own fight. I stabbed straight into a black mouth, my blade sliding between white fangs that nearly took my hand off at the wrist. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Ichiro’s sword sweep up over his head, but before he could touch his enemy, Ozu snatched up a lantern that had been left by the hearth and flung it with all the strength in her wiry little body straight at the creature plunging down on the two of them.
Light flared. The bakemono writhed and rippled in the air like smoke caught in a strong breeze. I wrenched my blade free, and Yuki jabbed with her staff, smashing through the remnants of the window frame to score a direct hit on what was left of our opponent’s face—if that was a face, if the thing had a face.
Something from Madame’s room keened like a hunting hawk. “There!” Masako called out. “Watch it, there!”
I stabbed again, hard, right where Yuki had struck, but my sword sliced through nothing and I nearly lost my balance, braced to meet resistance that didn’t come. How could I fight something that no longer seemed to be there?
I snatched up a lantern and thrust it between two splintered wooden slats and out into the night. I could see nothing. The thing had melted away, as if the darkness had taken it, piece by piece.
Yuki seized my shoulder, pulled me back, and scowled at me. She slapped at my arm, as if she were asking, “Don’t you want to keep that?”
I shrugged. “It’s gone.”
“Ours, too. Yuki, we need you.” Masako was at the door to Madame’s room. Kiku was leaning against her. The younger girl’s arm was bloody from shoulder to fingertips.
Ichiro was stamping on the wreckage of the paper lantern. There was no sign at all of the flying creature that had come down the stairs. Ozu ran to throw herself on Masako as the older girl eased Kiku down by the hearth.
“It was a bird!” Kiku chattered, shivering. “I think it was a bird! It was huge! Its beak came right through the screen! Will it be back? Do you think it will be back? Masako, what if it comes back?”
“Let’s not give it the chance,” I said, and knelt. One of the tatami mats that lay across the floor was askew, its corner overlapping its neighbor. I peeled that corner back. Under it was a trapdoor.
It probably wasn’t the only one in the house. But it was the only one all of the girls knew about. It connected to an underground tunnel that led to a hole beneath the hedge. Perfect for escape. Or ambush.
“No,” Masako said.
From where I knelt, I looked up at her. My sword was still in my hand.
“To strike blindly is to lose,” she said. “We don’t know what we’re fighting.”
“We can still fight.” I laid a hand on the trapdoor’s latch. “Better than waiting here like frightened birds in a nest.”
All the girls were watching. Fuku, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, had a smirking smile on her face.
The latch to the trapdoor moved easily under my fingertips. It was open. Had I turned it without noticing, my eyes on Masako?
“Kata,” Masako insisted. “No.”
I was sure I hadn’t.
“You shouldn’t”—Ichiro’s voice startled everyone. Saiko shook her head. But the boy didn’t stop talking, and he didn’t take his eyes from me—“go. If anyone does. You’re the one they’re after.”
“Explain.” I was back on my feet, and my sword felt light in my hand, like a bird longing to fly. “They’re after me? Why?”
The trapdoor at my feet exploded.
Heavy planks of wood burst into splinters and sawdust. Girls were screaming. The blast flung me to the floor, and I was rolling. I caught a glimpse of Masako’s face, half of it red with blood from forehead to chin. I saw Ichiro snatch Ozu and turn, falling to his knees, his back between her and danger.
Something grabbed my right ankle.
It was a fierce grip, and cold as a fetter of steel, dragging me backward, facedown along the floor. I groped for a handhold, but my fingers found nothing but slippery, flimsy mats. My sword—where was it? There, on the floor—beyond my grasp.
What had me?
I writhed and twisted, craned my neck, and saw.
My mind could not assemble what my eyes were seeing into a single creature. Impossibly long arms. Impossibly huge mouth. Tattered flesh, all gray and white, that seemed to be unraveling like poorly woven cloth. If it had eyes, I could not see them. If it had a heart, I did not know where.
If hunger had a body, it would look like this. And The Boulder hadn’t been enough of a meal for it. It wanted me.
Someone had an arm around my chest and was trying to pull me backward. My foot was going to snap off at the ankle. I kicked with my free leg, but it was no use. The girl holding me was being pulled right along the floor with me.
Masako’s sword lifted, a red-gold slash in the dark air, and came down. Once. Twice.
The thing howled and let go. I tried to roll free, but I was in a tangle with my would-be rescuer, and by the time I’d shoved myself away, snatched up my sword, and spun on my knees to face whatever was attacking me, the thing was—
—melting?
Ropes and rags of gray-white flesh were dissolving into shreds of clammy fog that crawled blindly about on the floor as if searching for help. Masako stood with her sword raised, and I braced myself, but we had nothing left to fight. The last of the mist vanished with a stench like rotting leaves, cold damp earth, age and decay.
“Find something—” Masako waved at the shattered trapdoor and then clapped a hand to her bloody forehead. “Cover that hole.” She sat down abruptly on the floor. Yuki was at her side in an instant.
“That chest over there,” said the girl sitting on the floor behind me, the one who’d tried to drag me away from the demon’s grasp.
I recognized the voice.
Saiko.
I threw myself on her and locked my hands around her throat.