Find Him Where You Left Him Dead by Kristen Simmons

Author:Kristen Simmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

* * *

They were heaved out of the box into a walled-in courtyard, hard gray stone under their feet.

“Where are you taking us?” Dax demanded.

He reached for Maddy as she reached for him, but one of the guards had gotten between them. When Dax struggled, he was struck in the gut, and with a grunt he fell to his side. The guard wheeled back to kick him in the face, his sandaled foot appearing beneath his robe.

“Dax!” Maddy twisted the splintered wood in her wrist and stabbed it into the guard’s shoulder.

He turned slowly, his eyes eerily blank. Maddy clenched her fists, ready to fight, but the man didn’t attack. He didn’t even seem hurt. Slowly, he pulled the wood free, revealing the black pointed end that had stuck into his body. It dripped ink to the ground as he lifted it, and he snapped it in one fist.

“What are you?” Maddy whispered.

“Let’s go,” the man spat as the other guard twisted her arm behind her back and shoved her forward.

“It’s okay,” Dax told her on a cough. He was jerked up, as if he weighed no more than a doll.

They were marched alongside a high stone wall cracked with black ivy and long spindles of spiderweb. The groan of the river came from somewhere behind it, taunting her, as if their freedom were just out of sight. Beneath them, the ground was paved with cracked stones, frigid against her bare feet, vines and prickly weeds shooting up in the gaps. The foliage thickened to the right, where a dirty white building with a black tiled roof jutted crookedly three stories into the air. It was bigger, more sophisticated, than Shinigami’s shack, though just as ancient, and dread filled her at the thought of what might wait inside. She glanced back to their wooden cage in the corner of the dingy courtyard.

There was no second box for Emerson and Owen.

The guard in front of them pulled back a paper screen door like the one at Shinigami’s house and walked inside, dragging Maddy by the arm after him.

Her eyes darted around the sparse hallway. The wooden floors were dark and glossy, the walls, white plaster. Paintings were hung at equal intervals—dirty sketches of naked women with women, and men with men, and even men and women in more than single pairs. All genders engaged in every possible configuration.

She felt a flush rise in her cheeks, but it cooled as she moved closer and saw the red, jagged smiles cut across their faces.

Kuchisake’s voice whispered in her ear: I can make you so happy. She shivered.

The hall turned and opened into a large, shadowy room, filled with people in moth-eaten kimonos and reeking of rotten food. Readiness coiled in her muscles. Were these players, like the people they’d seen fighting the tengu? They weren’t braced in defense, but frozen, like wax figures with dead eyes.

She would have taken fighters any day over the creepy stillness in this room.

Her eyes shot from what

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