The Night Itself (9 page)

“Vile humans!” the creature said, lips peeling back over its fangs. “You have no right to the sword! It is not for you. It belongs to my Mistress. Give it to me!”

Mine
.

“No!” I cried out.

The boy’s sky eyes flickered to me and the memory of his death speared me like a knife; the blood spilling through his fingers, his pained wheeze as he fell.
I can’t watch him die again
. I shook with relief as I heard sirens echoing in the distance.

“The police! The police are coming!” I babbled. “They have guns! You’d better run now, or they’ll shoot holes through you, you stupid cat. Can’t you hear them?”

The monster’s face showed confusion for a second. “Guns…” it whispered, grimacing, as if the word tasted bad. It stared at the boy, its tentacles lashing indecisively. Then a look of cunning crossed its face and it drew back, its shadowy form billowing upwards into an arch, like a frightened cat. The severed limbs on the pavement and the splotches of blood bubbled, running back towards the monster’s body in black rivulets.

“I will return,” it hissed. “And you will surrender the sword then – or die!”

The creature’s front limbs sprang up towards the top of the house next to the red-brick building, its body stretching out into an impossibly thin, black bridge. Then, like a rubber band snapping, the back limbs left the ground and the rest of it shot up, disappearing over the edge of the building.

Roof tiles cascaded down into the alley. The boy spun, scooping me up with one arm and pushing me back against the wall. All around us tiles shattered on the pavement with a noise like gunfire, but he was between me and them, sheltering me with his body. A chunk of broken ceramic bounced off his shoulder. He grunted with pain and I heard the katana rattle on the concrete as he dropped it.

“Are you all right?” I gasped out.

He shook his head wordlessly. Silky strands of his hair brushed my check. They smelled of pine trees and smoke. My nose nudged his chin. I wanted to look up into his face, but my own tangled hair was in my eyes. I tried to blow it out of the way. He made a tiny sound that could have been a laugh – choked and rusty – and suddenly gentle hands were combing back the unruly strands, deftly tucking them behind my ear. The movement was so natural, as if he’d done it a thousand times before. His fingers lingered there, just brushing the skin beneath my ear, making it tingle.

Now I could see him. The darkness of his almond-shaped eyes was filled with blue-grey curls, shapes like rising smoke, or the reflection of storm clouds moving over water. Didn’t I know those shapes? The singing was rising up inside me, a true, golden note – telling me that I knew those eyes. I was conscious of a crazy urge to grab his face and hold it still so that I could keep staring at him until I figured it out. Only I didn’t need to, because he was already holding still, staring back at me, searching my face for something – maybe for the same something I was looking for in him. Something … something…

There was a hoarse groan behind me. The boy jerked back, his hand falling away from my face as if he’d only just noticed we were touching. Shock and uncertainty flared in his eyes, cutting off whatever fragile thing had been starting to grow between us. For a split second I actually thought I was going to burst into tears.

And then I realized: that was Jack groaning.

I cursed and pushed away from the wall, snatching up the katana and its saya from the ground and flying across the street to where Jack lay half-hidden under a pile of motorcycles. I shoved the sheathed blade through the belt loop on my jeans, then grabbed hold of one of the toppled bikes by the wheel, trying to figure out how to heave it off her.

“Wait!” the boy said, appearing next to me. “Let me help you.”

By some miracle of luck, several of the motorbikes had got tangled up with one another as they fell, forming a cage around Jack rather than landing on her and crushing her. I couldn’t see any blood, but years of watching
Casualty
and
CSI
told me that didn’t necessarily mean she was fine. As the boy pulled the last bike off I dropped to my knees beside her, not daring to move her or even touch her, in case she had hurt her back.

“Jack. Jack, can you hear me?”

Her eyes stayed closed. Now I knew exactly how she had felt after seeing that car hit me the night before, and why she had been so angry that I hadn’t put the damn katana away.
This is my fault. This is all my fault. Oh God, Jack. What if she’s really hurt?

The boy knelt next to me, took Jack’s wrist in a careful grasp and laid the fingers of his other hand over the top. “Do not fear. She is alive,” he said gently. “Her heart is beating strongly.”

Jack groaned again and suddenly tried to roll over onto her side. I put my hand on her shoulder, holding her still. “Don’t move, Jack. Please just stay where you are.”

“Jesus, I feel like I got hit by a bus,” she whimpered. “What happened?”

“It was a motorbike,” I said. “Several of them. Help’s coming, OK? Stay calm. You’re going to be fine.”

“Whoa,” Jack said, blinking at me blearily. “Deja vu much?”

“I know,” I said, swiping tears off my cheeks. “But I don’t think you’re getting off as lightly as me.”

“Your friend’s pupils are the same size, and they are reacting evenly to the light,” the boy said. “She recognizes you and understands you. I think she will be all right.”

Fresh tears welled up and I scrubbed at them impatiently. “Thank you. I can’t even … for everything. Thank you.”

“Ah, who’s this?” Jack asked. “I don’t remember… Oh my God, what about that
thing
?”

“It’s gone,” I said, not feeling any need to mention that it had promised to come back, Terminator-style. “And this is… This is…” I blinked a few times. “I’m sorry but who
are
you? I mean, one minute I was all alone and the next you were just – there.”

“My name is Yamato Shinobu,” he said, sitting back a little and letting go of Jack’s wrist. “But where I came from, I cannot say, for … I do not know.”

The sirens wailed much closer now. I could hear tyres screeching as they circled, looking for signs of a disturbance. Shinobu’s head tilted as if he were trying to make sense of the sound – then his eyes lifted to the buildings surrounding us for the first time. He looked around, his expression part confusion, part awe. “This is a strange place,” he said softly. “I had not realized before how truly strange.”

I shook my head. Lots of people were called Yamato, but… “You don’t know? You don’t
know
where you came from? Or – where you are?”

“I…” The boy glanced over his shoulder and got swiftly to his feet. “I think I must look at this old man. There is a lot of blood. Do not concern yourself, Mio-dono – stay with Jack-san.”

Before I could form a question that would encompass even half of what I wanted to know, he had slipped away to where the homeless man still lay in the alley.

“What did he just call me?” Jack whispered.

“He called you Jack-san,” I said absent-mindedly, watching him from the corner of my eye. “Which is like … Japanese for ‘Miss Jack’.”

“Right. Cute. What did he call you?”

I gulped. “I don’t know.”

“Liar.” Despite her position on the ground, Jack managed to look menacing. “Spill.”

“Er – well, if I remember my anime subtitles right – he called me … ‘Lady Mio’.”

Jack blinked a few more times. “Hold up. Am
I
hallucinating now?”

“Maybe it’s contagious,” I muttered. “Because I never told him our names.”

Rachel doodled on the edge of her Jung essay in red pen. Her attempt at a rose had become a pool of blood, so she added a bloody hand print and then a curved, red-dripping dagger. Finally she swore, threw her pen down and tried her sister’s mobile for the seventh time.

For the seventh time she got a recorded message saying that the phone she was trying to reach was unavailable. She muttered under her breath and switched to Mio’s number.

“This is not funny,” she enunciated clearly once she had got through to the answering service. “I expect this kind of behaviour from Jacqueline, but not from you. You’ve been gone for hours. Ring me back and tell me where you are and what you’re doing
right now
or I’m calling my mother. That’s right, you heard me. And don’t think I won’t call your parents too, Mio!”

She hung up, dropped her phone onto the table in the Yamatos’ kitchen – where she’d brought her essay after the girls had left, hoping that the light and space would help focus her brain – and prowled backwards and forwards under the glass roof of the extension, staring up at the bruised grey clouds. It had been sleeting steadily for the past two hours. Where were they? If they’d gone indoors somewhere and decided to stay for lunch they ought to have let her know, dammit. If they got into trouble it’d be her ass in the fire.

She snatched a banana from the fruit bowl and ate it moodily, wondering if she really did dare call her mother, and if so, whether watching Jack quail under their parent’s wrath would be worth getting a scolding of her own for not looking after Jack better. Like she was supposed to put an ankle bracelet on the kid or something. Jack never listened to her anyway.

She tried both phone numbers again while she finished off the banana. Still no answer. She left another snappy message, then went to toss the banana skin into the rubbish bin and swore when she found that it was stuffed full. The lid wouldn’t even go down properly. Disgusting. Grumbling and muttering the whole time, she changed the bag and tied the full one up, then pushed open the glass door that led out to the Yamatos’ tiny back garden, where they kept their wheelie bins under the overhang of the garage roof.

She squinted up at the sky, then made a run for it across the scrubby grass. The sleet bored straight through the thin fabric of her jumper in icy needles, and by the time she reached the bins she was shivering, damp, and more annoyed than ever. Taking out the rubbish was Mio’s job. It was amazing how Mio, with her angelic face and perfect manners, managed to slither out of almost anything she didn’t want to do. And got away with it too, far more often than Jack, who always had to make a big deal out of everything. Rachel shoved the bag of kitchen waste into a wheelie bin, slammed the lid and braced herself to run back from the shelter of the garage overhang.

Then she heard something.

It was a pitiful mewing noise, weak and squeaky, like a tiny kitten. Rachel’s heart melted instantly. She made soft clicking noises with her tongue, creeping slowly round the edge of the garage, towards the thick yew hedge that separated the Yamato garden from the narrow alley at the back.

“Here, puss, here, cutie,” she whispered. “Come out, darling.”

Another pathetic little meow drew her forward, even though she could barely see where she was going. It was so dark back here that it was like night had come on without her realizing it, and the cold was intense. She needed to get the poor stray inside before the weather got any worse.

“Come on out, precious. I’ll look after you.”

There was another mew, close enough that Rachel was sure the cat must be nearly at her feet. She crouched down, extending her hand ahead of her, expecting to feel a tiny, shivering body and wet fur at any second. “There you are, puss. Are you hungry, hmmm? Are you hungry?”

The cat meowed again, right in her ear. Rachel jumped, and her hand made contact with something. Something clammy and gelatinous, like a giant slug.

It wriggled under her fingers.

She jerked back with a cry of disgust, but a weight hit her shoulders, crushing her to the ground. The wind left her lungs in a pained wheeze. She could feel something crawling across her back, and she struggled to suck in enough breath to scream, but another damp, rubbery thing slapped across her mouth, choking the cry back down her throat.

“Oh, yes…” whispered a low, gloating voice. “Yes, little girl. I am very hungry indeed.”

I had a moment’s panic as the emergency services finally arrived; the sword was still tucked at my waist and highly conspicuous. I didn’t have time to get my coat off and put it in the shinai carrier. I cursed myself.
You’ll get arrested!

The boy – Shinobu – leaned towards me. “What is the matter?”

“I can’t let them see…” I gestured to the katana, turning my back on the ambulance personnel swarming around the homeless old guy and Jack.

Shinobu frowned, then nodded. “Stay still.”

“What?” Before I could say anything else, the sword had disappeared from my belt loop. I gasped. I’d barely seen Shinobu’s hands move.

There was a tug at the neck of my coat. In the next instant the solid, reassuring weight of the sword was in its place in the shinai carrier on my back and the flap of torn coat was flipped back over the top. Shinobu stepped away, his head turning as he checked if anyone had noticed. “It is hidden.”

“How did you…?” My voice trailed off. I already knew the answer. He was incredibly fast.
Inhumanly fast
. I shrugged a little and felt the sword’s contented purr of energy as it settled into place. “Um. Thanks. Again.”