lap. Ayame stared sightlessly ahead, dark eyes fixed and unseeing, her expression slack. A trickle of white still ran from a corner of her lips. I wiped it away with a cloth and closed her eyes so it simply looked like she was sleeping. A memory came to me then: the image of a young girl dozing in the branches of a tree, hiding from her instructors. She had been so annoyed when I told her we should go back, and she’d threatened to put centipedes in my blanket if I told our sensei where she had been.
“I’m sorry,” I told her quietly. “Forgive me, Ayame. I wish it hadn’t come to this.”
You really have become a monster, haven’t you?
I bowed my head. My former clan sister was right; I was a demon, now. My very nature was to kill and destroy. There was no place for me in the empire, no place for me among the clans, my family and certainly not at the side of a beautiful, naive fox girl who seemed foolishly unafraid of the fact that I could tear her apart with no thought at all.
A breeze stirred the branches of the trees, and I sighed, running a hand down my face. Why had Lady Hanshou sent only Ayame and one other to face me? Ayame was one of the clan’s best shadow warriors and answered directly to Master Ichiro, the head instructor of the Kage shinobi. Only the clan daimyo could order such a mission, but Hanshou knew, better than anyone, that a pair of shinobi stood no chance against a demon. And yet, Ayame had said her mission was complete...
I straightened in alarm. Hanshou knew two shinobi wouldn’t be able to defeat me, that had never been the objective. Ayame’s mission wasn’t to kill; she had been a distraction. A ruse to lure me away from Yumeko and the others, leaving them alone in a shadowy cave...
With a growl, I turned and sprinted back through the trees, cursing my idiocy and hoping I wasn’t too late.
3
Blades in the Dark
Yumeko
I was worried about Tatsumi.
Not because he was a demon. Or a half-demon. Or had part of a demon soul sharing his mind with him. Actually, I still wasn’t sure what Tatsumi was, exactly. And I didn’t think he knew, either, if he was more oni than human, Hakaimono than Kage Tatsumi. But I wasn’t concerned about his demon side. I didn’t worry that he would suddenly turn on us in the middle of the night, though I knew his presence made Reika and the others very nervous. None of them, not even Okame, were comfortable having an oni in our midst. Reika would scold that I was being naive, that a demon could not be trusted, that they were evil and treacherous, and that I was foolish for letting down my guard. And maybe I was being naive, but I had seen Tatsumi’s true soul, the strength and brightness of it, and I knew he would do everything he could not to fall prey to Hakaimono’s savagery.
No, I wasn’t worried that he would betray us. I worried that his guilt and the fear of what he’d become would prompt him to leave for our safety. That one night, Kage Tatsumi would slip quietly away into the shadows, and I would never see him again. Knowing Tatsumi, he would try to find and confront Genno on his own, and though the demonslayer was incredibly strong, I didn’t know if he could single-handedly destroy the Master of Demons and his army of monsters, blood mages and yokai.
Oh, Tatsumi. I would help you, if you would let me. You don’t have to face Genno alone. You’ve been alone long enough.
“Yumeko-chan?”
I blinked and glanced up. Okame sat cross-legged in front of me, one hand on the facedown cup between us, an expectant look on his face. “It’s your turn to call,” he said.
“Oh.” I looked down at the cup beneath his fingers, wondering what to do. I hadn’t really been listening when he gave the explanation. “Gomen...what were the rules again?”
“It’s easy, Yumeko-chan.” The ronin smirked. “You call ‘cho’ if you think the dice will turn out even, ‘han’ if you