Curses and Will Chapter 24: Chapter 3: The Hand of Nightmare

Read chapter 24 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The air in the room grew dense almost immediately. His face shifted like a storm gathering out of clear weather, and his voice, when it came, sat as deep as the bottom of the sea. "Jonathan gave it to me," I said, "after I told him about my past. About the curse, the disfigured yokai I could see. He told me it held all the truth I needed. So what does it say?" His voice calmed, but something underneath it didn't. "So you too." There was a look in his eyes I recognized from somewhere, the particular expression of a father who'd already lost more than he could properly carry. I started to ask what was wrong, but before the words finished forming, he stood, took me by the shoulder, and led me into the room where his students practiced during the day. He shifted the safety gear piled in the corner, pulled at a lamp tipped against the wall, and a door I hadn't noticed swung open beneath it. A door to a basement. A thousand questions rose in my mind at once. What was kept down there. Why hidden so carefully. Kagenken answered none of them out loud. He simply led me down into the dark, and there, waiting in the basement's low light, stood a disfigured yokai easily ten feet tall, its back bent unnaturally backward, its face turned upside down on its own neck, one eye missing entirely, its mouth stitched shut with thick black thread. Cold sweat broke out across my entire body, but this time it felt different from the usual dread. Closer to ice crawling directly under my skin. I went down to my knees, and the creature noticed immediately that I could see it, the way they always noticed. But this time I felt no bloodlust radiating off it. No malice at all. Instead its arm stretched slowly toward me. I scrambled backward, but it reached past me instead, caught something behind me, a smaller yokai that had apparently been lurking in the dark corner of the basement, and ate it whole. Its mouth tore open through the stitches, blood dripping like black thread unraveling, and once it had finished, the stitches pulled themselves back together like something alive in their own right. I started to understand what I was watching, and then a voice came from behind me. Kagenken, his tone heavy with something like sorrow. "It won't hurt you. It's a Zetsu, not an ordinary yokai. These are souls bound to this world because they failed to protect someone they swore to protect, lost them to a yokai, and carried that loss into something close to venom in a heart that froze instead of healing. They hunt yokai because of it. Harmless to humans, as long as we don't interfere with them or whatever they're hunting." I sat with that, stunned. How could Kagenken see this thing at all. Why wasn't he afraid. Why wasn't he doing anything to stop it. And the question that rose up out of some unconscious, hopeful part of me before I'd decided to ask it. "Wait. You can see them. Are you cursed too? Like me?" It felt like finding water in the middle of a desert vast enough to kill you slowly through the act of crossing it. Some part of me was genuinely happy at the thought, that finally someone else understood exactly what it felt like to witness horror that didn't belong to this world. But another part of me wanted to reject the idea outright, wanted it to be false. Maybe I didn't want anyone else carrying this. Not him, not after everything he'd already given me. Kagenken's answer came quiet. "No. I can't see them. But Jonathan could." Hearing his name brought everything rushing back at once, a knife twisting into wounds that hadn't closed properly. I forced the feeling down, even as something inside me kept crumbling at the realization of how many secrets had been hiding behind that perfect, composed mask Jonathan had always worn. He'd been cursed too. He'd been suffering this entire time, and I'd never once noticed, too lost in my own grief to see it. The air around me suddenly smelled like rusted metal, the scent of grief thick enough to choke on. Kagenken continu