The Night Itself (13 page)

“Hi guys,” she said. “Is everything OK for the three of you?”

Shinobu went very still. Jack choked on a sip of her coffee and I reached out and pounded her between the shoulder blades, turning a politely baffled look on the girl.

“Three of us?”

She blinked a couple of times. I literally saw her pupils dilate as she stared at the mug of tea sitting abandoned in the middle of the table and then at the place where Shinobu was sitting. She laughed uncertainly. “Oh, wow – sorry, I thought I saw a bloke sitting back here with you. Weird. Must’ve been an optical illusion or something.”

“Yeah. Weird. We’re fine, thank you,” I said, willing her away.

She walked back to the counter, still giving us uncertain looks over her shoulder.

Shinobu looked after her, then down at his long fingers, turning his hands over as if he’d never seen them before. The glossy mass of his hair slid forward over his shoulder, the overhead light gleaming blue on the dark strands. “I
am
here. I can touch things, feel pain – so I must be a part of this world. Why cannot all inhabitants of this place see me as you can? Why did that girl seem to perceive me at first and then not?”

“Dude, this is too weird. Are you seriously
invisible
to everyone else?” Jack wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her shock made me realize that I hadn’t filled her in on any of the things Shinobu had told me while we were stuck in the hospital waiting room. But it didn’t seem right for me to just blurt out what he’d said; irrationally, I felt as if Shinobu had been confiding in me, that his honesty about his suffering was for my ears only.

“Shinobu,” I began hesitantly, “is it all right for Jack to know about what you told me? You know, about … where you’ve been? What you remember?”

He considered both of us. “I have not told you everything yet. Perhaps I should begin at the beginning and relate to you everything that I can remember. It will be easier to tell it all at once and be done with it.”

Jack nodded eagerly. I was a little less eager, not sure everything he was going to tell us would be particularly pleasant to hear, but I nodded too.

“I was born in the country that your language names Japan,” he began, “and if the Nekomata spoke the truth, then my birth was over five hundred years ago. I was orphaned as a young child, but friends of my parents – the Yamatos – took me in and raised me as their own. They were good people. My adopted father was a swordsman who had retired with much honour from the service of his master to live in the small village of his birth. He taught me kenjutsu, the way of the sword. He taught me … everything a boy needed to know.” He paused, his eyes suddenly blank. I realized with a chill of horror that the family he talked about were long dead. Shinobu was never going to see his father again.

Then he shook his head, and just like that, the moment passed. “The rest is confused. I must tell you everything, because I do not know which parts are truly important and which seem important only to me.

“Just after I turned seventeen, a newcomer settled in the village. He was wealthy and well-mannered, although he was considered a little strange with his solitary habits. But within a few weeks of his arrival, people began to go missing from the village. They simply vanished – from their fields, their beds, their baths. None of us had any idea of where they had gone, and they were none of them the kind of people who would run away and leave their families.

“One night one of the missing, a young girl, came back. At first she seemed exactly as normal, and her family were so happy to see her that they welcomed her into their arms with few questions, and did not doubt her when she said that she could not remember anything from the time she had been gone. For two days the village rejoiced. On the third day, her family were found slaughtered in their beds. Each of them, from her baby brother to her ancient grandmother, had been sucked dry of blood. There was no sign of the girl. But bloody tracks led from the house of death to the house of the newcomer.”

Jack gulped audibly. I sat frozen against the booth, the coffee glugging uneasily in my stomach.

“Many people wanted to drag the newcomer out and kill him, believing him to be a demon. Hearing the commotion outside his house, the newcomer threw open his doors and told us that he knew what monster haunted our village and how to destroy it. He claimed the beast, sensing he knew this, had stalked his house in the night, but had been unable to enter it because of the protections he had put in place. And when we looked, we saw bloody hand prints and claw marks, signs that something had tried to get in but failed.

“The newcomer brought out ancient scrolls and papers and showed us pictures and descriptions of just such events as had overtaken us. The nature of the beast was that of a nine-tailed cat which supped on human blood. Having fed from a man or woman, it could take their form and all their memories so that it might slip unnoticed into their life and prey on their loved ones. It was a Nekomata. It could be killed, but only by one with great strength, speed, and skill. One who was willing to risk his life for his village.”

“You,” I whispered. “Your village picked you.”

His shoulders tensed, and he let out a long, slow sigh. “I volunteered.”

“God,” Jack breathed. “I can’t even… That was so brave.”

Shinobu shook his head again. His eyes were shut now, and his back hunched. “It was not bravery. It was fear. It was very clear by then that no one was safe, and I had already lost my family once. I could not endure the thought of losing anyone else. I could not bear to watch and wait for it to happen. I needed to do
something
, to fight, even if that was selfish. She – they begged me not to go.” His hands clenched on the table top. “Begged me. I ignored their pleas. For myself, for my own sanity, I volunteered. I thought – I thought the worst that could happen to me was death.”

The
worst
that could happen?

I wanted to climb over the table to him. To put my arms around him. To tell him that it was all right now, it would all be all right. Anything to make him sit up out of that defensive ball of agony and open his eyes again. But it wouldn’t be all right. It would never be all right.

He had lost everything, and he didn’t even know why.

Nothing I can possibly say or do will make it better
.

“I saw the fight in my dream,” I prompted softly, trying to drag him back from the memories.

“Huh? Hang on, are these the dreams you were babbling about before?” Jack asked.

“Yes. I didn’t remember them until last night when I… Well, you know after the accident, when I was out cold. I’ve been dreaming about him for years. I saw him…”
I saw him die
. And he had seemed to see me,
recognize me
, as he lay dying. It made no sense. It had happened hundreds of years before I was born. “He beat the Nekomata, but it got him before it turned to stone.”

“I was careless,” Shinobu admitted, opening his eyes at last. “Over-confident. I thought the monster was done-for after I wounded it.”

I hadn’t thought he looked all that confident. I thought he’d looked as if he’d gone into that fight prepared for, even expecting, death. I wondered if the ones he cared for so much had ever really appreciated the depths of his love for them, a love so great that it had been easier for him to embrace the probability of dying than live with the risk that they might be hurt.

What would it feel like, to be loved like that?

“So what happened then?” Jack asked. “I mean … did you die? How did you get to be here, alive, in London, five hundred years later?”

Shinobu spread his hands. “I do not know. That is the truth.” He explained to Jack – more plainly and bluntly than he had to me – how he had found himself trapped in a timeless, inescapable prison. “If it was death, then I could never escape it. There seemed no hope. Until…” He looked at me, and the tense, unhappy expression on his face lightened a little. “Until I began to see Mio-dono, in the darkness. She was a child that first time, tiny and delicate, her hair long and her feet bare. She held my sword – this sword – in her hands, though she could barely lift the weight. I saw her, and I had life again. A half-life, surely, but better than what had come before. From that moment, I have been connected to her. Like a shadow, I have trailed in the wake of her brightness.”

“That’s … sweet? And also kind of creepy…” Jack said uncertainly.

I sat bolt upright in the booth, both hands flying up to my face. “You saw that? You saw me with the sword, when I was a kid? With my ojiichan? You were with me all these years?”

Shinobu nodded warily.

“Oh my God. I know where you were. I know where you were trapped. You were in the sword.”

I
was…?” He stared down at the weapon.

“You were dying,” I said slowly, working it out. “You had the sword in your hand. And somehow – I don’t know how – something happened, and you ended up inside it. Like a genie in a bottle. It makes sense. That’s why you remember me from when Ojiichan first showed me the katana. I
felt
that connection. I felt something respond to me. That was you. That’s why I have been dreaming about you all these years. Shinobu, the blade was your prison.”

“The blade?” Jack repeated doubtfully. “He was in a sword? Is that possible?”

“Is a giant nine-tailed demon-cat possible?” I asked, rather sarcastically.

She blinked. “Fair point.”

After glancing at the barista to make sure her attention was elsewhere, I drew the katana out through the hole in my coat and laid it on the edge of the table. Shinobu stared down at it. His hand stretched towards me, as if to touch the sword, and then drew back. “I think…” he said. “I think you are right.”

“Ojiichan said the katana has been in our family for generations. Your Yamatos must be my ancestors. After you … disappeared, the Yamatos kept your sword.” I frowned. “The Harbinger said something about that. He said
he
had chosen us to protect the sword. But the sword already belonged to you, to us.”

“The sword has changed since it was mine,” Shinobu said softly. “It feels different; it pulses with a strange energy now. My sword was just a sword, a fine sword that I was proud to carry, but no more. The Nekomata showed no interest in it. It sought only my death. Now…”

“Now it’s obsessed with it. And it said it was coming back for it.”

There was a little pause.

“Wow, Mimi,” Jack breathed. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how to fix this. I tried to put the sword back last night, I did. I couldn’t do it. Why did I ever take it out in the first place? Why?” I drew in a shuddering breath.

“This isn’t your fault,” Jack said.

“That’s not what you said earlier,” I reminded her. “You
told
me to put him back in the box.”

“You could not have known the danger,” Shinobu said to me. “To punish yourself now for that innocent mistake would be wrong. You would not judge another so harshly. Would you?”

Tentatively he reached across the table again. His fingers stopped a whisper away from mine, which were curled around the katana’s sheath, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to bridge the tiny distance.

He had rubbed my bruised fingers in the hospital room, and I had dragged him onto the Tube, but those touches were different. As I stared at our hands so close together on the wooden table top, I could almost feel that breath of air between our skin spark with electricity.

My gaze connected with Shinobu’s. There was a physical jolt, like two magnets jumping together. Like two perfect musical notes meeting and singing as one.

“Guys?” Jack’s concern had transmuted to curiosity. Her gaze was like a heat-lamp burning the side of my face.

But I couldn’t look away. I didn’t think Shinobu could either. It was beyond either of our control. Because I knew those eyes… I
knew
those eyes. Didn’t I? The pattern of blue-grey flecks that moved in them and the lightning-quick thoughts and feelings that flickered behind them? His smell, the rhythm of his breath … so familiar… I knew how his silky hair would feel in my hands. I
knew
.

The door of the coffee shop opened with a cheery tinkle of the bell.

“You can’t bring them in here,” the barista called anxiously. “Only assistance animals are allowed.”

Have to hold on. Don’t let go
.

The green blade sliced down—

“Shit!” Jack spat out the word.

I jumped, blinking, and shook my head dazedly, conscious of Shinobu suddenly sitting back on the other side of the table.
What just happened?

“They’re not mine,” said a woman, sounding annoyed. “There’s loads of them hanging around outside. You ought to call the RSPCA.”

Jack’s hand clamped down on my shoulder. “Sorry to interrupt your moment, but I don’t think that’s a good sign. Look!”

I turned and saw the barista with a tray in each hand, desperately trying to shoo a pair of cats outside. One of them was obviously a stray, with mangy-looking tabby fur and ragged ears. The other was a sleek and well-fed grey, wearing a collar. Both of them were spitting at the poor barista. As soon as she opened the door to try and nudge them out, ten more swarmed inside. The woman who had just entered the coffee shop shrieked. The barista slammed the door hastily as the animals ran between her legs.

The cats formed a bristling wall, inching towards us in our booth in the corner. Outside, I could see more cats, dozens of them, pressing up against the windows and the door. Their eyes almost glowed. I could hear the low, mesmeric notes of their cat-yodelling through the glass.

The white-faced barista fled to the shelter of the counter, where she fumbled for the phone. She picked it up – then stopped and stared down at it like she couldn’t understand why it was in her hand. The woman by the door looked around in sudden confusion, her eyes sliding away from the wall of hissing, spitting felines like melting butter sliding off a knife. “Weren’t there…? Huh.”