“But then she escaped,” I said.
“Yes. I don’t know how, but she did.”
“I think I know,” I said. “There’s a boy. An Abby.”
“Abby?”
“Abnormal. A human with power.”
“Ah. Understood.”
“Are there Abbies in other worlds?”
“You misunderstand the way it works, Lady Death. We’re all one world. All the humans in one, everything else in their own. Like your beloved angels and their Briah. It’s a separation the gods agreed to long before you or I sprang into existence. ”
“The gods?” I said. “There are more than one?”
He laughed, then stopped when he saw my face. “You thought there was only one?”
“The Creator,” I said. “You’re saying He has company?”
“You are new, aren’t you?”
“Don’t be an asshole. Just answer my question.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you ever wonder why you didn’t take many souls where they didn’t worship your god?”
“I guess I was too busy to notice,” I said.
“That’s the way with your lot, isn’t it? You love the idea of being the center of the universe.”
“So you’ve been to this world before,” I said. “The human one.”
“Yes,” he said carefully.
“What’s changed?” I said. “Why can’t you do your job?”
He didn’t respond for a moment, and when he did, his voice was low and quiet. “I don’t know. I feel as though I’ve lost my connection to my world. As if something tore or cracked and now I can’t feel the way I need to. It’s like I can’t breathe.”
“Could it have something to do with the Abby boy? The one that let her free?”
“It’s very possible. Where is he?”
“I’m looking for him. He’s…I think he’s opening up holes in the world. I thought the Yuki-onna took him, but now I think he might be in Erebos.”
“Hell,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Matthew is in Hell.”
“Maybe he should stay there.”
“What?”
“Better he causes damage there than this world. It’s our purpose. Protect the humans. It’s your purpose too, if I’m not mistaken. Meanwhile, we can find a way to fix what’s broken.”
“We?” I said.
“You and me. Unless you want the crack to deepen. Which could bring consequences I’m positive you don’t want to deal with.”
“Yeah, well, I never signed on for this,” I said.
He laughed a dry laugh. “None of us signed on for this,” he said. “It just is. You may as well accept it.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“So, you’ll help me?”
“No.”
He frowned. “Your world is in danger as long as the Yuki-onna is loose.”
“I have a thing.”
“A thing that’s more important than saving the world?”
“There’s more than one world.”
“I’ll kill your friend,” he said. “I can do it. With a wiggle of my little finger.”
“You’re not going to kill him,” I said.
“Do you want to take that bet?” he said.
I pursed my lips, looking at his face. It was suddenly hard and I could see the coldness in his eyes. He would kill Gage. He’d have no problem with it. I couldn’t let that happen. Gage had been the only friend that had stood by me these past few years. And I knew it hadn’t been easy for him.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Okay, then,” he said, sitting back, a satisfied smile spreading. “So you’re going to help me.”
“I need to go to Erebos,” I said. “You don’t understand. Someone is in danger.”
“Who? The boy?”
“No, someone else,” I said. “It’s very important.”
“Is he dead?”
“Not yet.”
“Help me first. Then go to Erebos. Unless you want a dead friend on your conscience.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll help you. But first I have to do something.”
“What?”
I squeezed the trigger on the Makarov and the room exploded with the sound of the shot. Aki looked down at the blood pouring out of the hole in his chest. It was odd. Like thick, viscous black smoke. He looked at me, shock and irritation in his eyes.
“Ow!” he said. “You didn’t have to shoot me.”
“It was on my to-do list,” I said. “Don’t ever threaten my friends.”
“Fine,” he said, “if you don’t shoot me any more. This was a new suit.”
“No one can see you,” I said. “Why do you need a suit?”
“It’s called personal grooming,” he said, looking up and down at my dirty jeans and tee-shirt. “You should try it sometime.”
“I will shoot you again,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, rubbing his chest. He took his hand away to reveal that the hole was gone. Just a hole in the middle of his dress shirt. “Can I have some of that coffee now?”
“No,” I said. I was starting to feel a tug deep in my chest. It grew, becoming more intense, just on the brink of pain. “She’s started again,” I said. “I can feel it.”
“Then I guess we’d better go,” said Aki with an unsettling smile. He was hard and wiry as we traveled, and I couldn’t help but feel a moment of sadness that he wasn’t Lucifer. I pushed the feeling away. Aki smelled heavily of cologne, but underneath there was something else. Something stale and old. As we touched down, I pushed him away, the nearness of him making me feel slightly ill. He staggered, nearly falling over.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s a common reaction,” he said, busying himself with straightening his shredded suit. “So, where are we?”
“Does it matter?” I said, wrapping my arms around myself in the cold. Aki seemed unaffected and looked around him curiously. We were in a small city, dirty and run down, with high mountains in the distance. I ignored Aki and walked down the street, following the pull in my chest, aching and throbbing more by the second. The street was empty, the air frigid with a sharp wind cutting against my face. One by one, I touched the lost souls, confused by the sudden end, so pointless and cruel. A mother staring into a frozen baby carriage. A group of teenage boys outside a video store. A young couple near an ice cream parlor. A pretty woman in her thirties with dreadlocks like ropes in her hair cried when she saw me. A man tried to run away, the gray in his beard not nearly as plentiful as he would have liked before he saw my face. I caught him easily and he nodded in understanding before he went. Every one felt like a kick in the guts, the way the souls looked at me, the fear, the tears, the loathing. To them, I was the one ending their lives, not the Yuki-onna.
“Why do they hate you?” said Aki. “It’s not your fault.”
“Human nature,” I said.
“They fear you.”
“Everyone fears me,” I said.
“Even your friends?”
I swallowed down the bitterness his words brought up.
“Yes. Even my friends.”
“Not all of them, though. There’s one who is not afraid.”
“I can’t think of him right now,” I said, too quickly. “I’m here to help you, remember? To save Bobby.”
“I can help you, too, you know,” said Aki, looking at me slyly. “It goes both ways.”
“I don’t need your help,” I said. “I like to be able to trust the people around me.”
“Well, we both know that’s a lie. You forgive faster than you trust.”
He didn’t talk any more after that because the cold became suddenly overwhelming. For a few moments I couldn’t get my breath. When I did, it felt like my lungs filled with ice, as if the lightest of blows would shatter them. With each step, my limbs grew heavier, the numbness setting in quickly and crawling up my arms and thighs. I couldn’t feel my face and my eyelashes became stiff, m
aking it hard to blink. Aki didn’t seem to be suffering from the same problems, but was looking around, alert, searching for the source of the cold.
I forced myself to trudge forward, past a dirty convenience store, through the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. Aki was giving off black smoke, but it didn’t seem to slow him down. I was struggling to keep up with his casual stroll. There was a flare of heat in my core, something that was keeping me from freezing solid like the last time.
We walked straight into the bright white funnel of snow and ice and wind. And there she was, standing atop a pile of ice pushed into a great mound that was taller than I was. I squinted. Not ice. I looked at the blue crystallized shapes under the Yuki-onna. I made out the lithe shapes of arms and legs. Hair. The pale and unseeing eyes of hundreds of bodies frozen solid with the blue that now writhed in the gilded birdcage that hung from her hand. She saw me and smiled, her small teeth colored red. Her eyes slid past me and landed on Aki.
“Why have you brought him?” she said, seeming more hurt than angry.
“I had to,” I said. “He was going to kill my only friend.”
“I could be your friend.” Her voice echoed quietly in my head. “We could rid the world of all of them. All these barbaric men. They take our dignity, they take our children, and they shut us away. But you and I, we could make them cry. Our names would be the last sigh on their pale, cold lips.”
“They took your child?” I said. For a moment, the Yuki-onna looked absolutely human. The hurt in her eyes, the slope to the shoulders, the trembling lip. But then she straightened and remembered herself. And there was nothing in her eyes but cold cruelty.
“They will take yours too,” she said. “He wants to kill me.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And what do you want? Do you want to save me? Have you looked into my soul and decided that I’m worth it? That I could be fixed?”
“No,” I said. “I don't think you have a soul.”
“He doesn’t have one either,” she said, motioning to Aki. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The endless nothing inside of him. It is frightening, is it not?”
“It is,” I said.
“Imagine what it’s like to have it inside of you,” she hissed from somewhere deep in my head.
Aki had been silent thus far, but he spoke now. “Enough,” he said, his voice strange and hollow. The Yuki-onna stopped her whispers and looked at him. Fear. It was all over her. Even her writhing blue heart seemed to have his attention.
“What did you do?” I said, staring at the Yuki-onna, rigid and unmoving on the mountain of corpses.
“This is why I’m here,” said Aki, not taking his eyes from the Yuki-onna. “If you interfere your friend will die.”
He strode up to the frozen dead, raising his knees to climb up, and stood beside her. He bent toward her and whispered in her ear. He whispered for what seemed like a very long time. When he finished, the Yuki-onna looked at me. A dark red tear fell from her eye and rolled down her face. I was shivering violently. I tried to hold onto the flame inside me, the white-hot heat, but it was just as weak and trembling as I was.
The Yuki-onna lifted her arm and raised the cage, her heart barely moving, the blue flames surrounding it hardly daring to flicker. With her other hand, she opened a door in the cage and reached in, holding the heart in her hand. She took it out and held it in front of her. The blood was pouring from her eyes. She didn’t look at me. It was as if she’d forgotten I was there.
“Stop it,” I said. “Leave her alone.”
Aki smiled. “Don’t you see what she’s done?”
“She couldn’t help it. Look at her. She’s confused, crazy. Just put her back where she came from. It’s not her fault the door was opened.”
“Silence,” Aki said, and there was the same hollow resonance to his voice.
“Did you just tell me to shut up?” I said.
Aki frowned at me. “Silence, or he’s dead.”
“Don’t make me choose,” I said. “This isn’t right.”
“You already chose,” said Aki. “The moment you brought me here, her life was void.”
He turned and once again whispered in the Yuki-onna’s ear. She raised her hand and put the heart to her lips. The cage tumbled down the frozen mountain with a series of clangs and rolled to a stop at my feet.
“Oh my god,” I muttered. I made my legs move, but I’d hesitated too long. The Yuki-onna opened her mouth, the heart muffling her sobs as she pushed it in and bit down. I forced myself up the hill, trying not to think about what I was climbing on, using the rock-solid arms and legs as footholds. The Yuki-onna was screaming between bites and Aki was smiling down at me.
“Stop it, you son of a bitch!” I said, pulling out the gun and pointing it at him. “Stop it or I’ll shoot you again. This is cruel.”
As if in reply, he spoke to the Yuki-onna. I could just hear his voice. He said, “Finish it.”
With something in between a groan and a sigh, the Yuki-onna shoved the rest of the heart into her mouth. She started shaking, vibrating, and then she seemed to melt away until she was a form, standing before a wide-eyed Aki, made purely of blood, her hand poised at her mouth. And then she fell, the blood becoming liquid and then solid again as it touched the ice, freezing immediately on top of the pile of frozen bodies, a thin layer of red covering the top of the mountain.
Aki looked down at me, my mouth hanging open, my eyes wide, my heart in my throat.
“She couldn’t help it,” I said again, hating how weak my voice was.
“She was a monster,” he said.
I straightened, something hot and bitter rising in me.
“We are all monsters,” I said. He screamed as I emptied my gun into him.
* * *
I reluctantly brought Aki back to Gage’s apartment. Had Gage not been under his knife, I would have left the bastard there to let him figure out a way home on his own. I didn’t know how Aki’s power worked, and if he were to find Gage again on his own, he might kill him out of spite. I’d already pissed him off by putting a whole lot of bullets into his shiny little suit. He didn’t speak until we were safely back at Gage’s place. Just cast me sullen looks.
“She wasn’t you,” he said finally, his voice tight and controlled.
“She could have been,” I said.
“We all have our duties,” Aki said. “You keep the balance in your way and I’ll keep it in mine.”
“Maybe balance is overrated.”
“That may be,” he said, “but she was killing people. And she wasn’t going to stop. Nothing you or I did or said was going to stop her. She talked to you, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“You saw yourself in her.”
“She said someone took her child,” I said. “She was so broken. Maybe she could have been fixed.”
“You can tame a tiger,” said Aki, “but eventually the tiger will remember that it is a tiger.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means the Yuki-onna is a monster. You can’t turn her into a pet. She’s going to go back to her nature at some point. It’s only a matter of time.”
“You say that word a lot. Monster.”
“So?”
“So, what makes her a monster?”
Aki didn’t answer, but instead sat down on the couch wearily.
“Was she always a monster?” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I need to know,” I said.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them to look at me. “No,” he said. “She wasn’t always a monster. She was a person once. But she chose to become this way. Maybe out of grief. Maybe out of madness. You make a choice to be one way or another, Niki.”
“She was an Abby?” I said.
“Maybe. I don’t know. The point is, she was killing people. Don’t you care about that?”
I frowned and looked away. “Yes,” I said. “I don’t know. I used t
o care. I used to care so much.”
“You forget sometimes, don’t you?” he said.
“Forget what?”
“What it’s like to be human.”
“I held up my end of the bargain,” I said. “Are you going to let Bobby go?”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Of course.”
“How will you get back?” I said, suddenly curious. “When you’re done, I mean. Can you leave yet?”
“I guess I’ll find out when the time comes.”
“You owe me,” I said.
“I am aware of that.”
“You said you ripped a hole in your world and stepped through. Followed the Yuki-onna here. Is that like how we travel to Hell and back?”
“Yes, it is the same principle,” he said. “You need to visualize who or what or where you want to go to, and then you step through. If you don’t have the specifics in mind, you’ll get lost in the Black.”
“The Unsung,” I said.
“Is that what you call it?” he said. “How poetic.”
“Could you go back if you wanted to?”
“Why?”
“Just wondering.”
He frowned. “I tried to go back. Before. When I realized I couldn’t feel her. I wasn’t able to even touch the fabric of the world.”
“So you can’t go world-hopping?”
“Why?” Aki said, frowning.
“It doesn't matter. I’m going to get ready,” I said. “And check on Bobby.”
“He’s fine,” he said quickly. “I didn’t hurt him.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t trust you.”
“I don’t require you to trust me,” he said. “I’ve already gotten what I needed.”
“I would have helped you,” I said. “If you asked.”
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
I ground my teeth as he followed me into Gage’s room. I sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at the big man that had been my only friend for so long. He was barely moving with each breath and for a moment I thought he was dead. But then his breath hitched and his chest moved. I looked over at Aki, leaning against the door frame. I looked back at Gage.
“Bobby,” I said, shaking him through the quilt that covered him. He didn’t stir. I looked back at Aki. “What the hell did you do to him?”
The Devil's Backbone (A Niki Slobodian Novel: Book Five) Page 6
