The Name of the Blade, Book Two: Darkness Hidden (4 page)

“Falling in love?” he said again.

We were slowly leaning into each other’s space, moving closer, closer, with each breath. Shinobu’s fingers were still touching my hair, not quite cupping my jaw. My hand had crept out to curl into a fold of fabric at his waist.

“Yes.” The word slipped out of me on a long sigh.

The corners of his lips tilted up in that heartbreaking, half-shy, half-cocky smile. He bent his head and I lifted mine. My body prickled with nerves and excitement as our lips touched—

The katana jumped against my back, sending out a painful buzz of energy. “Ow!”

Shinobu jerked back. He looked dazed. “What happened?”

“The sword!” I said crossly. “What was
that
, you – you stupid hunk of metal?”

The katana responded with another harsh buzz, even stronger than before. It seemed to shudder against my spine. I frowned. That didn’t feel like a laugh. It felt like … like the way it had buzzed last night in the Nekomata’s lair.
A warning
. “Something’s wrong.”

I ran for the stairs and bolted down them, with Shinobu right behind me. My feet hit the chequerboard tiles in the hall with a slap and I flung open the door to the sitting room. Rachel was on the window seat again. She started as we burst in. By the time she opened her mouth, my eyes had already done a lightning-fast scan of the room and ascertained one vital fact: My best friend wasn’t there.

“Where’s Jack?”

“Listen, I was just—”

“Rachel,
where is Jack
?”

Rachel huffed. “She went to try calling those fox people again. She’s worried about that guy.”

“She went outside on her own?” Shinobu asked urgently.

“I just said that.” Her eyes widened as she took in our expressions. “It’s broad daylight!”

Shinobu was already across the room, swiping up his new katana and wakizashi from the sofa as he passed. He had the sliding doors to the kitchen open before I got halfway there.

But not before we heard Jack scream.

CHAPTER 3

S
plinters of the kitchen table and crockery that the Nekomata had destroyed scattered around my feet as I darted towards the garden door. But somehow Rachel managed to get there before either me or Shinobu. She wrenched the door open with so much force that the hinges shrieked. Shinobu was only a second slower. I was the last one into the garden.

Jack lay prone on the dead grass. A huge, dark
something
hovered over her. I let out a hoarse yell of anger and fear. Without stopping to think, I ripped the sheathed katana from its harness on my back, readying to free the blade.

The thing reared back, unfolding with a dry chattering noise that made me think of pulled teeth rattling in a box. An overpowering stench of burning hair and decay blasted my nose as the creature took off into the air. The sun was high and bright, directly above us, making my eyes blur with water as I tried to track the creature with my gaze. All I could make out was a jagged black shape growing smaller against the sky.

“What was that?” I breathed. “How did it—?”

“Jack!” Rachel fell to her knees beside her sister.

My stomach lurched as I saw the empty look on Jack’s face. Her eyes passed over us like she didn’t know who we were. She rolled away from Rachel’s hands and curled up into the foetal position.

A cold wind seemed to blow around my neck. I heard the rattling noise again – getting closer. My head snapped up in time to see the thing plummeting down at us.

I ducked instinctively, folding down over my knees with the katana clutched to my chest. Rachel threw herself across Jack, shielding her sister with her body in exactly the same way that Jack had tried to shield her last night. Shinobu spun, drew his short wakizashi blade, and then threw it.

The sword whistled through the air, burning a golden streak across my vision as it caught the light. The blade struck home with a wet thud.

The creature let out a high-pitched, seagull cry that made my teeth ache. Wings thrashed, filling the garden with that eerie rustling rattle and spreading so wide that they blocked out the sun. In their shadow I could finally see the creature clearly.

It was a nightmare vision of a woman, at least eight feet tall, with a ragged mane of silver-black hair and greyish lizard scales covering a muscular, naked body. Her legs bent the wrong way, like a dog’s, and ended not in feet but massive paws, tipped with yellowing talons. The creature’s lower jaw looked as if it had been designed to crush through bone.

It had no eyes. Only empty black sockets.

The monster keened, clawing at its own shoulder as it tried to rip Shinobu’s blade from its flesh. Yellowish liquid bubbled up around the wound as the talons gained traction. The creature wrenched the sword out – and flung it straight back at Shinobu. He dodged. The blade sank hilt-deep into the hard soil where he had stood only a second before.

The creature’s wings kept thrashing, nearly deafening me with their rattle. They were grey, dry and dead-looking, marked with a pattern of yellow rings and dots. No. Not dots.
Eyes
. Dozens of them, yellow and gleaming amid the dull grey feathers.

Eyes that were now fixed on me. On the katana in my hand. The thing surged upwards and then dived again.

“Mio-dono!”

I was already moving before Shinobu’s shout of alarm reached my ears. I fell flat onto the grass, the impact rattling my bones. The monster’s swoop carried it just above my head. It screamed with what sounded like frustration as it missed, its claws raising long white scratches on the concrete patio ahead of me. At the last moment, the thing shot back up, narrowly avoiding a collision with next door’s brick wall.

Breath sawing painfully, I flipped to my feet. Then I shoved the katana firmly away into the harness on my back.

“What are you
doing
?” Rachel demanded.

“My job. Protecting the sword,” I snapped.

I couldn’t risk fighting with the katana, not like this. If I’d ducked a second later, the creature, whatever it was, would have seized the blade from my hand and flown away with it. This monster was already injured, thanks to Shinobu; there was no need to risk unsheathing the blade and unleashing its power here.

Shadows and blood…

“Are you crazy?” Rachel shouted as the monster wheeled around in the air above the garden and came in for another attack. “Do something!”

I ignored Rachel and the sword’s angry-hornet buzz against my back as I looked around for something else to use as a weapon. Anything! Even a rake would do. As I hesitated, Shinobu hurdled Jack and placed himself squarely in the monster’s path. He raised his sword defiantly. My heart turned to rock in my chest.

“No! Shinobu, get down!”

He acted as if he hadn’t heard me, the muscles in his back and shoulders tensing as he prepared to face the thing alone.
Stupid, fearless boy!

My eyes lit on the big terracotta planter by the back doorstep. My dad used it to grow mint and other cooking plants. Two feet long, half a foot wide and filled to the brim with soil, it probably weighed more than I did.

Time to find out how strong I really am
.

I lurched forward, grabbed the edges of the planter and then
heaved
. As the heavy pottery scraped across the patio tiles, amazement and elation mingled inside me. It was moving. It was really moving. Dragging it sideways and up, whipping my body around to build momentum, shoulders and back screaming, I lifted the planter, higher, higher, above knee height, above waist height, above shoulder height—

The winged monster stooped over us.

Now!

I let the planter go.

The pot smashed into the monster’s face and chest with enough force to flip it over in midair. I leapt back as Shinobu ducked, both of us barely avoiding the swipe of deadly claws as the creature cartwheeled. Frozen clumps of soil and chunks of terracotta rained down, and the monster crashed to the ground with a sound like a helicopter falling.

Shinobu leapt onto the thing’s massive chest and sank his katana deep into its heart.

The grey wings jerked, beating at the air spasmodically. Gusts of stinking air tore at my skin and clothes. Rachel choked; I thought she might be sick. Shinobu swayed back from the force of the wind. He pulled his sword free and jumped off, ready to deal another blow if necessary.

The dry chittering sound faded away like a sigh as the grey wings fell still. Among the feathers, the gleaming yellow eyes closed.

Rachel took her hand away from her mouth, her gaze flicking from the smashed wreckage of the planter and the dead monster to me. I could see the thoughts scrolling through her head as clearly as I could read the banner at the bottom of a daily news programme:

How could she pick that up?

How could she possibly throw it?

What is she?

There was fear in her face.

The air seemed to have turned to ice, trapping us all in that beat of time, hurt, afraid, disbelieving. We might have stood there for hours.

Jack made a strange gurgling noise. Rachel and I broke eye contact as I skidded forward, almost collapsing onto the grass as I reached them. Jack was still curled into a ball, painful shivers working through her body.

“It’s OK, Jack, it’s OK. It’s gone.” I was babbling. My hands shook uselessly in the air above her back. I didn’t know how to deal with this. I thought I knew every mood Jack ever had, from fury to terror, but I’d never seen her react to anything this way. Rachel grabbed her sister’s arms and dragged her roughly over onto her back.

I cried out in protest. “Don’t—”

“She’s convulsing. She could bite her tongue.”

Jack’s eyes had rolled back in their sockets. Her limbs, stretched out, were stiff and twitching uncontrollably. Her face was contorted. But there wasn’t a mark on her, apart from the pink pressure marks on her left cheek from lying on the grass. She hadn’t been bitten, or clawed. The only sign that the thing had even touched her was one of those dull moth-grey feathers clinging to her short hair. “Oh my God. Oh my God…” I whispered.

“We must get her inside,” Shinobu said urgently.

“Shut up.” Rachel didn’t look away from her sister. Her hands clutched desperately at Jack’s face as she tried to hold her still.

“It is not safe out here.”

“He’s right.” Pathetically grateful that there was something I could do, I caught hold of Jack’s legs. They kicked against me. I bit my lip, using the pain to force back useless tears.

“You get away from her!” Rachel snarled. She let go of Jack to shove me away. My knees skidded across the grass. Shinobu caught me before I toppled over.

Rachel scooped her arms under Jack’s body and lifted her in one smooth movement. I gaped. Jack was three inches taller than Rachel, and she was pure muscle. Rachel shouldn’t even be able to win an arm-wrestling match with her, let alone lift her like that.
Adrenaline rush?
The grey feather spiralled out of Jack’s hair into the wind. The sun sparked yellow in Rachel’s eyes as she turned away from us and marched into the house.

I swiped tears off my face, scrambled to my feet and followed Rachel with Shinobu at my heels. Rachel carried Jack into the living room and laid her down on the big sofa, then knelt next to it, clasping her hands together as if she was praying.

For a moment I thought those prayers had worked. The dreadful shuddering in Jack’s body stopped. Her arms and legs unstiffened. Her eyes slowly rolled back down, the irises sliding into their proper places just before her lids eased closed. She expelled a deep sigh that sounded like relief.

Then Rachel gasped. The marks on Jack’s left cheek were getting darker, deepening like a new purple bruise against Jack’s golden skin. Those weren’t pressure marks from the grass. It was some kind of rash. The marks spread as I watched, blooming across Jack’s face and down her neck to make a pattern of rings and dots. Rings and dots.

Exactly like the eye pattern on the monster’s wings.

“What is this?” Rachel sobbed. “Oh Jesus, what’s happening?”

I snatched up the phone and dialled 999.

“Jacqueline Juliette Luci?”

The raspy voice brought me, Shinobu and Rachel to our feet. The world tilted oddly under my boots; Shinobu’s hand on my shoulder kept me upright until the dizziness had passed. Behind me, the
beep-beep-beep
of Jack’s heart monitor carried on unaffected, reassuring and infuriating at the same time.

A middle-aged male doctor stood in the gap in the floral-patterned curtains around Jack’s bed. Jack’s eyelids – a dark, bruised purple in her chalky-pale face – moved. But her eyes didn’t open.

“That’s her,” Rachel said, her voice wavering.

“Is she asleep?” the doctor whispered as he began to back out of the little enclosure around the bed, clearly relieved to have an excuse to escape.

“M’wake,” Jack mumbled. Her eyelids flickered open for a second, but squeezed shut without giving me more than a glimpse of her eyes.

“She has a headache. The light hurts,” I said.

My voice didn’t tremble like Rachel’s. It came out flat and emotionless. Rachel sent me a resentful glare. I couldn’t explain that the only way I was keeping it together was to shut everything down. If I let a single emotion out, I would break. Messily. That was the last thing Jack needed.

“I’m Doctor Singh. How are we feeling, Jacqueline?”

“Bad,” Jack said faintly. “Everything hurts.”

“Well, that’s only to be expected. You’ve had quite a scare today, hmmm?”

Rachel and I exchanged a look across the bed, united for an instant in dislike of the baby-talk, before she looked down at Jack again. She tugged on the ends of her scarf. “Can you please tell me what’s wrong with her?”

The doctor shuffled slowly around the bed. He peered at the monitors, peered at Jack, made a notation on the clipboard and then offered us an apologetic shrug. “We’re still waiting for the test results to come back. Until then it’s hard to pinpoint the cause of her reaction.”

He’s stalling. He doesn’t want to tell us
.