I stopped, listening to the throaty croaks of the toads in the misty path, the unearthly cries of raccoons.

  Arata slowed, moonlight on the back of his haori, glossy against his black hair until it looked almost white. For a moment, I could see Ryunosuke in the profile of his face like a beautiful ghost.

  I took one step forward, dead leaves splitting under my feet. I’d learned long ago that waiting for someone else to save you meant losing the opportunity to save yourself.

  Right timing only comes once.

  I lunged forward, throwing the scabbard past him. Arata eyes darted toward the flash of lacquer. My vision was swimming, tiny sprites at the edges of my eyes. I gripped the handle of the blade like a dagger, taking aim. All it would take was one sharp drive between the ribs to the beating wet muscle housed inside. The jar’s contents would slide down his throat before he died, before his body became an unusable vessel and useless to me. We would be back at the temple by dawn. I would barter my freedom with my new cursed vessel, a sharpened blade pressed to Akechi throat.

  I coughed, spitting up blood. Pain seared through me like fire blooming across my flesh.

  Arata pulled his sword out of my chest, flicking my blood from his steel blade.

  “Did Akechi order you to do this?” he asked, lowering his mask. He looked nothing like the man I had spent the past few days with, the veil of kindness gone from his eyes.

  I refused to fall to my knees. I’d already spent so much time on the ground, far more than I would ever admit to a human. If I could buy enough time, I could heal this wound. I could devour him bones and all, I could—

  “He doesn’t deserve you.” Arata suddenly gripped my chin. My body froze. I couldn’t feel my legs or arms, my limbs encased in invisible concrete.

  “What are you—”

  He leaned forward and kissed my petrified lips, soft at first, and then deeply. My mouth opened, coaxed by whatever curse he had put on me. Something slid between my lips, warm and slippery. I fought the urge to gag as it slithered across my tongue, down my throat. Arata’s lips pressed harder against mine as the thing crawled down to my gut. It thrashed against my insides. I forced my eyes open and saw Arata’s gray ones staring right at me, grave-cold. On the ground by his feet, the jar was on its side, the lid open. Panic swelled in me. I willed my arms to move, but I could barely twitch a finger.

  His hand and lips finally released me. I tried to raise the blade still in my hand, but it was no use. I felt depleted, boneless. As if I were drowning, again. Blood spilled from the wound in my chest. The thing inside me was growing, squirming, feeding on my strength.

  “I was silent, just as you asked,” Arata said. “Now it is time for you to keep your promise. To the other side, to the other side…” he hummed cheerfully.

  I looked down at the empty jar, finally understanding.

  I told him I wanted to meet in the forest to avoid trouble with the brothel owner. But in truth, I wanted no witnesses.

  “I want you to leave,” I said, handing him back his haori.

  “Have I been a bother?” Ryunosuke asked.

  Most cursed spirits are skilled at lying, but I could not move the right words from my chest to my tongue. “I don’t know,” I answered instead, an unfinished thought. What I wanted to say was: I don’t know what I’m becoming when you’re around. “Please leave. Otherwise, I will probably kill you.”

  “Could you do it?” he said, not looking at me as he put his haori back on. “Would you finally feel strong enough then?” His hand was on the hilt of his sword. His eyes narrowed, a familiar cruelty on his smirking lips. “You will need to be if you want to stop me from doing what they sent me to do.”

  At that moment, I remembered. He was still an assassin for the imperial guard. All this time we were just playing house. The world behind the walls of the Pleasure Quarters were no more real than the make-up we smeared onto our faces each morning, the carved masks the actors donned each night. It had been so long, I’d almost forgotten.

  He pulled the blade out of his wooden scabbard. I laughed as he assumed the position of an executioner, sword raised.

  Arata took the blade from my hand and held its sharp tip to my neck. The forest seemed to spin in dark blues, as if we were underwater.

  “What did you put into me?” I asked.

  “Just a piece of me. Nothing too serious. I’m still new and a little afraid of commitment,” he grinned. “I’d planned to take that monk’s body, but I wanted something to happen now. I was getting bored in there,” he motioned to the open jar. “So, I made an agreement with the boy instead.”

  The boy? “Arata Watanabe?”

  Something thrashed sharply in my gut. I dug a claw into my palm, drawing blood.

  “No, no. The one inside you. The one sick with love for you.”

  Ryunosuke.

  “He’s dead. I killed him.”

  Arata waved dismissively.

  “Whatever you say. Anyways, he did not like the new boy. He wanted to get rid of him.”

  Jealousy is a consequence of love. And love is a consequence of weakness. A blue-tailed lizard darted into view and then disappeared down a burrow. My vision blurred from the blood loss. I fought back the urge to vomit.

  “He took over your body for just a moment. Just long enough to let me out. To let me crawl into my pretty new vessel while he slept,” the creature in Arata’s skin explained, leaning close enough to peer into my eyes as if I were the one inside a jar now. “The Watanabe family has a long history of demon hunting. Not my favorite clan. The taste of too much cursed blood on them makes them a rotten meal. I’m sure Arata or one of his spineless elders had already sensed you at the temple or during one of your jobs. He probably came to take your head under the guise of penance training. Under the guise of being friendly. Assassins really are the worst kind of executioners, don’t you think?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Arata held up a finger over my lips.

  “Sorry, all that time spent keeping my mouth shut and now I’ve just got too much to say,” he sighed. “Let’s go do something fun. Your contract with the monk is still in place, is it not? Akechi is overconfident, which means he will not give up so easily. And I know you cannot stand that look in his eyes, that look like he thinks he has already won.” He leaned in so close his lips grazed my ear. “How long have you been waiting to devour those eyes? Let me help you.”

  My claws lashed out, barely missing his throat as he leapt back. My arm had moved on its own, compelled by phantom strings.

  The demon in Arata’s skin grinned with his sharp teeth.

  “So, the boy inside you breaks deals as easily as bones. Or perhaps you are his weakness. I can’t say I’m surprised or even disappointed. We both know how delicious betrayal can taste. But a body is a crowded place for two souls, isn’t it? Shall I pull him out of you and devour him piece by piece?” His grin widened. “Or will you do it yourself first?”

  I was lying by the river. The sun was hot on my face, but my legs and arms were in the shade, cold and damp from the soil. Everything was sore from the fight. My mouth was wet, a sticky sweetness clinging to my tongue. I sat up and wiped my lips, the back of my hand staining dark red.

  Several yards away, a bear was feeding behind a large stone. I walked over quietly, not wanting to start an unnecessary fight, but curious about what there was to eat.

  Beneath the bear, obscured by its massive brown furred back, were two legs clothed in a bloody hakama, twitching in time to the bear’s feeding. Wet smacking sounds filled the air. Chewing sounds. Bones cracking. Nearby, a sword was abandoned near the water, unsheathed.

  Ryunosuke’s blade.

  There’s a strangeness to a body without the glaring light of life in it, like an oversized sack of rice. I looked down at the thing on the ground, really looked at it. It was almost silly. Taking up so much space, all those limbs.

  Crack. Crack. Crack.

  The bear looked up at me, its eyes consumed in purple flames. A cursed creature. Possibly the unfortunate test subject of a twisted curse wielder. Or perhaps it had simply consumed the bones of a cursed body left to rot in the forest.

  Begone.

  I slashed the creature back with my claws. It howled, its bloody breath miasmic. I leapt back, noxious clouds ballooning around us. The creature’s paw lashed out behind me, three new bloody welts streaking across my back. Pain seared over my vision. My sandals sank into the dirt. I blinked once, twice, my eyes re-focusing, then sprang forward. Instinct sharpened my teeth and hair into messy slaughter tools. A cursed body is forged from misery. It is made to kill, to burn, to hate. My claws sank into flesh, tearing fur and skin off the creature’s throat. Blood splattered onto my cheeks and kimono. The bear fell back, stumbling over Ryunosuke’s body. It ground its jaws, chewing on something still in its maw. Someone. A human that had once belonged to me. I grabbed the creature’s jaw. Rage splintered my vision now. Ryunosuke had been mine. My eyes flitted over toward the lifeless bloodied body on the ground, the one I’d torn to shreds with my own hands. This is what I had wanted wasn’t it? To be free of him? To be alone. A cursed body can only kill, burn, and hate. Isn’t that what I had told him? The creature roared against my grip. With a clenched fist, I sent my cursed flames into its open mouth. They exploded in purples and then charcoaled to black. The creature stilled, crumbling to the ground.

  Behind the crackling flames, Ryunosuke’s body was still dressed in the haori he always wore. What remained of it anyway after the bear had torn through the smooth fabric. My hands still felt sticky as I pulled the body up. I tried to remember his face, but all I could picture was the slaughter, the calmness of his face as it happened. I wanted to ask him why he’d raised his sword to me with no intention to kill. Why hadn’t he stopped me? Where was his pride?

  Why wasn’t I happy?

  But a corpse has no answers for the living. At least he would finally know the true meaning of death. Wasn’t that what he’d always desired most?

  Sparrows rustled in the trees.

  I laughed.

  Good riddance. I would miss the expensive wine.

  I wiped the creature’s blood that had splattered onto my face. It mixed with the blood that was still on my hands, smearing across my lips.

  An unfamiliar ache pulled on my chest. A feeling like sinking into a black sea. I swallowed back the copperish taste in my throat, but the feeling did not wash down with it.

  Inside the bloody mess, something gleamed wet and red under the morning sun like a petaled flower after the rain. Another beautiful thing left behind.

  Ryunosuke’s heart was miraculously intact. I reached in and tore it free from its useless cage. All these bones and tendons. A body was nothing but a cage. I brought the heart to my lips. It was still warm. Was this how it felt to kiss a human?

  “Is he really still in here?” I asked the cursed spirit in Arata’s body.

  I’d heard tales of consuming a soul, of obliterating a soul, but nothing of saving one to another body through consumption of the flesh.

  A heart for a heart. A soul etched into skin.

  “Will you rip yourself open to find out?” he asked, amused.

  My hair flared out like hooks, wrapping around his arms and legs.

  “Will this violence please you enough to forget about him?” He laughed as I lifted him off the ground. The strands of hair tightened around his chest, his ribs on the verge of snapping, but he didn’t even flinch. He looked me in the eye as if he were delighted. Like a madman staring at a house he’d set alight. “Or are you that desperate to die?”

  Pain ripped through me. Arata’s sword swung back through the air as if wielded by the wind and sank into my arm again. Warm blood trickled down my elbows to my hands. My grip weakened, my hair dropping him back to the ground.

  Arata brushed the black strands off his kimono coat, watching me sink to the dirt. “What could a cursed spirit want more than power and revenge?” he asked, standing over me. “Or have you truly relinquished your pride to that human inside you?”

  Pride?

  I raised my left hand, pain still throbbing through me like lava in my veins. For a moment, I felt the phantom welts on my face. The roaming hands of strangers on my body. The beautiful things that remained among the ruins. Pride was an armor I’d earned through blood. But when had it actually protected me?

  Arata frowned, almost with pity. “Come now. It’s time for us to feast on a treacherous monk.”

  He was right. I’d wanted vengeance so badly for so long. Hadn’t I pictured it each night, dragging Akechi into that soundproofed room he kept me in, of all the ways I’d make him hurt?

  But there are so many hours in a night, and a demon doesn’t need much sleep. When the fog of anger settled, I was no longer in that temple. I was in the dark alleys again, with the crying women, on the dirty beds, in the locked rooms, a gash of light always just out of reach, a misery so deep it had no name.

  Is it possible for a demon to love a human?

  I thought again of myself devouring that stranger in the alley behind the brothel, the blood covering my tattered kimono and face, the face of a monster.

  Was it possible for a human to love such an indisputable demon?

  I thought of Ryunosuke’s back, how he’d never taken off his haori until the night I asked to see the scars on his body. How he was the only man who never asked me to open my body to him as if it were an honor.

  “I never understood why Kiyohime had been turned into a curse just because she’d loved the wrong person,” he’d said like a fool.

  “She should have just devoured the monk and gone to live a peaceful life in the mountains,” I replied, lingering on the smile on his face.

  Hadn’t I just wanted to be rid of him? Hadn’t his existence been like a curse on me?

  The open jar glinted against the moonlight.

  “Can you get rid of it?” I asked.

  “It?”

  “The boy inside me.”

  The demon that had possessed Arata’s body pursed his lips.

  “Is that what you really want?” he asked.

  “Can you get rid of him or not?” I repeated, unable to meet his eyes.

  “It will be a bit messy. But isn’t impossible,” he answered, the smile playing on his lips again. “If you are willing to make a sacrifice.”

  Akechi sat in the garden in front of the wilting tulips, sketching a sparrow perched on a browned petal. Beside him, gold-speckled koi fish flicked their monstrously long tails over the surface of the pond.

  “It’s done,” I said, tossing him Arata’s right hand.

  He studied the blackened fingers, the flesh half-rotted from the journey back.

  “Did he say anything before you slayed him?” he asked, imbuing an energy border around the rotting specimen.

  “He begged for his life,” I answered.

  The sparrow took off. Akechi eyed the blade in my sleeve.

  “I have a new job for you,” he said, standing.

  “What poor unsuspecting idiot is it this time?” I asked, peering over the pond. The cluster of white-orange koi scattered into deeper water at the sight of me. When I looked back up, Akechi’s face was close enough I could see the long scar on his neck, the flint color of his irises.

  “You’ve lied to me,” he said, lowering his head just enough so our eyes were on the same level. “Arata is alive.” He stepped back and picked up the hand from the stone, glancing back at me as if I were a guilty human child, stolen sweets hidden behind my back. “How did you convince him to give you his sword-wielding hand?”

  “I didn’t. I just took it before he could stop me.”

  I pulled the blade from my sleeve.

  “Oho, so you plan to use my own weapon against me?” he said, unsheathing the binding blade from under his orange shawl. “Very well, I will enjoy you for a bit, and then end your long suffering.”

  Our blades clashed, divine steel against divine steel. The monk had not earned his position and power through appearance and words alone. Steel grazed my scalp and sliced across the thick shoulder of my kimono, drawing blood. Koi fish gathered by the edge of the pond as if expecting treats. My muscles strained, still drained from my earlier battle with the demon in Arata’s body. Akechi fought with his eyes closed, one hand behind him as if relaxing to music. Insolent creature. I took a step back, aiming my blade at his throat.

  His mouth suddenly dropped open, unfamiliar words spilling from his lips in rapid succession. A cursed incantation.

  The cicada on the handle of my blade fluttered to life, translucent wings batting against my fingers. It flew up, landing on my left eye. I jerked away, but it wouldn’t move, blocking my vision. The centipede slithered to life next, down the hilt, sliding up my wrist and arm, up my neck and curled around my ear.

  “Tomare,” Akechi ordered, and the creatures halted their assault.

  He walked over, leisurely. A lion in top form.

  “The soldiers always say that a demon smells worse than the rotted flesh of their dead comrades, but I disagree,” he said, lowering his head and taking a deep breath against my neck. “I’ve always thought you smelled like a river, like the sea. That wonderful aroma of something that takes everything that pours into it.”

  My body moved on its own, grabbing a hold of the monk’s head. Two hands pulled by phantom strings. I leaned in, pressing my lips into his. The monk struggled, his dried lips squirming against mine. I opened my mouth, my tongue like a blade forcing his open, the creature sliding up my gut and my throat. It crawled into my mouth and then squirmed into his. A copperish, slimy taste. A curse looking for a new home. His body thrashed, but my hands, our hands, held tightly onto his head, claws grazing his scalp and ears. Akechi choked, the wet sounds of drowning as the creature pressed down into his throat, seeking warmth.

  I wanted to ask him if he really understood how many ways a body could lose meaning.

  The afternoon light was a heaven-like gash in the forest canopy. The river rushed from the previous night’s rain, the smell of blood washed away by lush greenery. For a moment, I imagined myself as neither human nor demon, but as a songbird perched on a high branch, ready to alchemize the air in my lungs into music instead of fire.

 

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