Blood Ninja (46 page)

Taro felt Hiro’s hands under his armpits. He started to say
No, help the girl first
, but he saw from the corner of his eye that Hana was already standing, cheeks wet with tears.

He couldn’t look at her. He’d killed her father, and that was unforgivable, even if her father
was
a murderer and a—

I’m a murderer too
, he thought, the realization stealing his breath.
I’m as bad as the ninja who killed my father, and on whom I vowed my revenge
.

He pushed Hiro away from him, using up the last of his strength, then stumbled to kneel before the girl he had orphaned. He handed Hana his sword and bent his head. “I am samurai,” he said. “I choose this death freely, of my own will, in recompense for my dishonorable action.”

Hana wiped tears from her cheek. She pressed the sword back into his hand. “I don’t cry for
him
.” She inclined her head to indicate the body, lying on the steps below. “I cry for the father I believed in, who I today learned was no more than a child’s story.”

“I’m sorry,” said Taro simply. He could think of nothing else to say. He almost wished that she had taken him up on his offer, had let the blade slice through his neck and condemn him to nothingness.

“Yes,” she said. “I know you’re sorry. I won’t ever forgive you
for killing my father, not really. But I won’t ever forget that you saved me from him either.”

She sobbed, then seemed to impose her own will on herself like straightening armor, and stood firm. “Enough,” she said, seemingly to herself. “Let’s go.” She turned to Taro, concern in her eyes. “Can you walk?”

He nodded.

“Oda’s blood has revived you?” asked Hiro.

Taro narrowed his eyes at his friend, who looked at Hana and then shut up. She knew nothing about vampires, this girl, and he wanted to be able to explain it properly later.

He took a step back, and fell once more to the ground.

“Not enough, it would seem,” said Hiro. With casual strength he picked Taro up. “Let’s go before others come.”

“What did you do with—,” began Hana. Her eyes were on Taro’s teeth.

“I’ll explain later,” said Taro. He turned to Little Kawabata, who had held back as Taro and Hana spoke. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I thought you hated me.”

Little Kawabata’s eyes narrowed, not with anger but with what looked like shame. “I discovered that my father had betrayed you. He sent a messenger to Lord Oda, meaning to warn him of your mission. I left the mountain to stop him.”

Taro’s mind was making a connection. “The ninja by the road, on the plain.”

Little Kawabata nodded. “My father’s man. He was bound for here, to tell Lord Oda you were coming. I got to him first. But I left him there, as a warning to my father, in case the news reached him.”

Taro remembered that Shusaku had said it seemed like a message, and it seemed the older ninja had been right. But now he looked at Little Kawabata’s smooth, undamaged hands, the skin clear and unburned by the sun. “How did you get up here?” he asked. “It’s full daylight outside.”

“It was you who turned me,” said Little Kawabata. “I think you
must have passed your ability to me. I noticed when I was on the road.”

Taro couldn’t believe it. It seemed like by saving Little Kawabata he had made him a stronger vampire than he’d intended, one who, like him, could withstand the sunlight.

It was good, therefore, that the boy seemed to have decided he was an ally, not an enemy.

“Your father …,” he began. “I would have thought that you would support his agenda, not fight to prevent it.”

Little Kawabata looked pained. “I found that … my father was not the man I thought he was.”

Hana touched his hand. “I know how that feels.”

“We should really be going,” said Hiro, who despite holding up Taro was breathing normally, as if his friend’s weight were nothing more than a slight inconvenience. “We’ll have time later to discuss all this, if we even get out alive.”

“You’re right,” said Taro. “Hana, are you coming with us?”

“I think,” she said, “I had better, don’t you?”

Hiro began to walk down the stairs, stepping carefully so as not to trip and drop Taro. “Shusaku’s dead,” said Hiro. His arms were trembling very slightly with the effort.

“I know,” said Taro. The wound from the sword caused him less agony than the wound this memory gave him, and the wound was healing, the process sped by Oda’s blood. He thought perhaps the wound caused by Shusaku’s death would never heal.

He had avenged his father’s death by killing Lord Oda, and yet he felt nothing. And now he had done nothing but cause the death of another man who had taken care of him, another man who had become in the last weeks almost a kind of father himself.

“I’m sorry,” said Hiro. “He was a good man.” He paused. “And Yukiko? Also dead?”

Taro shook his head. “She … changed her allegiance, told Lord Oda where we were. I didn’t explain properly how I had met Hana before. I believe she thinks I’m a traitor.”

Hiro’s eyes were wide open. “But … Yukiko … she and I …” He frowned. “We were
friends
.”

“I know,” said Taro. “I’m sorry.”

Hiro’s face settled into a hard expression. “Well, if anyone knows how she likes to fight, it’s me,” he said. “If she comes after you, she’ll have to get through me.” But it clearly pained him to say it, and Taro felt a wave of pride in his friend.

Hiro obviously hadn’t looked at Hana properly, and now he turned his head in the stairwell and examined her. “You’re the girl from the woods!” he exclaimed. “The one who gave Taro a ring. You’re Lord Oda’s daughter?”

“Yes,” said Hana. “Pleased to meet you again.”

Hiro thought for a moment. “I can see why that would look bad to Yukiko.”

“Me too,” said Taro wearily.

“Well,” said Hiro, “we should go. Before Yukiko sees that Oda is taking too long, and comes after us herself.”

Taro touched Hiro’s arm. “Wait.” He turned to look at Hana. “My brother. We can’t leave without him.”

Hana looked at him silently a long moment, and he knew what she was thinking.
He’s dead anyway; he’ll weigh us down; he may get us killed
.

But she nodded. “I will get him.”

She turned and ascended, and a moment later came down carrying the boy over her shoulder. His body was so wasted by his starvation that she supported him easily, though sweat beaded on her brow.

Then Hiro shifted his friend’s weight in his hands, feeling Taro’s blood warm on his hands, praying to the Compassionate One that Taro would not be taken by death, not yet. He passed the corpse of Lord Oda, his limbs now contorted in unnatural configurations.

Taro forced himself to look at Oda. The man was unmistakably dead.

Hana looked at her father’s broken body, and a fresh blade of grief eased between the muscles of her stomach, cutting her open;
she was surprised to look down and see that she didn’t bleed, surprised her body could contain such pain.

She felt the delicate bones of a Tokugawa heir through his parchment skin, and felt the coldness of his dead body. She saw a living Tokugawa before her, many times over the better of her cruel, honorless father. She hardened herself. From now on, this was her care, this her responsibility.

Taro felt Hiro’s muscles and tendons straining.

Taro looked to his side. Hana’s tears were drying on her cheeks. Little Kawabata walked beside her, helping her to support the weight of the younger brother he would never know. It seemed to him amazing that this boy who had tried to kill him in the rice store on the mountain was now walking down the steps of Lord Oda’s tower with him, having helped him to get his revenge, and to survive.

He looked down. His blood dried on his friend’s robe.

Together they walked down the stairs as hard as stone, as hard as the path they still had to travel, and into the light.

None of them saw the drops of blood that fell from Taro’s terrible wound and laid a vivid trail on the stone.

None of them saw the drop that fell, as if ordained to do so by some cruel god, whispering on the air to distort its flow, into Oda’s open mouth.

And certainly none of them saw when, a moment later, the eyelids of that broken man opened wide, and he took in a rush of breath, the air whistling as it passed through shattered bones. The onyx eyes fixed on his enemies’ departing backs with a gimlet stare, as if to sear their semblances onto his mind, where they would burn in the lord’s hateful memory until he could exact his payment.

Lord Oda’s fury was like the waters of a dam following heavy rain. He felt it pressing against his eyes, his hands, seeking to burst forth. He felt it in the coils of his entrails, which protruded slick
and glistening from his slit stomach, though already the wound was beginning, painfully, to close itself up.

His own daughter had betrayed him, had proven to be weak.

Yet the monks teach that Zen brings balance to those who are patient. A girl he didn’t know, a relative only in spirit and not in blood—Yukiko, she had called herself—had warned him of the Tokugawa boy’s presence in his tower. For that he would reward her.

Yes. He had lost a daughter, but an opportunity to redress his injury had arisen. It was perfect. He would make Yukiko his own, replacing that other who even as she walked into the sunlight was dead to him.

It would be beautiful: a child to kill a child.
She
would destroy Taro. He would train her. He would make her his tame sword saint, broken into doing his every bidding.

But first he had to live.

Fortunately, Oda knew much of the vampires, and that presented a way to mend his broken form, to staunch the life that even now was flowing out of him. There was risk, too. He weighed it in his mind.

You will be a monster
.

On the other side of the scales, a shorter thought, more simple—

Otherwise you will die
.

He decided.

He rolled himself over, gasping at the astonishing pain from his broken limbs, and began to lick up the drops of Taro’s blood. A thought crossed his mind.

Yukiko. I will make her vampire too. A vampire girl to kill a vampire boy
.

As he worked, and his bones began slowly to knit, a person standing in that small, twisting space might have observed that his canines began to lengthen, and gleam.

But no one did.

Kenji Kira stretched his back. These hills were ruining his poise, his balance, his inner calm. The ground was too steep for the horses, which he and his men had consequently abandoned in the care of villagers in the valley below. As a result the muscles in Kira’s back ached constantly, as did those in his calves and thighs. He cursed this hilly country, in which there was nothing to be found but pine trees, peasants, and rice paddies
.

The men, too, were beginning to question his judgment, he was sure of it. Ever since he had killed the girl, that upstart of a ninja who had insulted him, they had grown quieter, more downcast of gaze. This was a matter of degree, of course, for the men
always
looked down at the ground when Kira was near, in the deferential stance that he preferred—not that he had ever been required to imagine any other stance, since the lower-ranking members of his coterie had always stood thus while in his company. Indeed, he was of such rank that no one apart from Lord Oda had looked at him directly since he was a child, and those who had known him then were all dead, either by
time’s slow sword or by Kira’s own
katana,
which was sharper and had sent almost as many to their deaths
.

He knew the men were asking themselves if he had lost his eye, were questioning the long search in the mountains that had led so far to nothing
.

Yet he had been so sure. Several nights before, while his men had been carousing at an inn, Kira had made the company of a seasoned old soldier, now turned private guard, who had recently left the employ of Lord Oda. Or, more precisely, had been asked to leave, his drinking having grown to be an embarrassment. This man told an extraordinary story, of Lord Oda’s daughter, whom he had been paid to defend, and how one night in the country she had run away
.

Kira had had a certain experience in the matter of runaway women. He usually caught them in the end
.

Yet Oda no Hana had come back, to everyone’s surprise. It had been assumed, with some sympathy for her plight, that she had been escaping the marriage her father had arranged for her. And more surprising still, she’d come back with an amazing story—of how she had encountered four
ronin,
and killed them all with their own weapons
.

To his surprise, Kira had found himself leaning forward intently as the old man laid out his tale, which Kira had never heard from his employer, Lord Oda, and he suspected the story had been covered up by the girl’s entourage
.