TAMING MY KILLER DEMON

Odds the Body's Mine

Chapter 4

"Odds the body's mine," I said.

The collar burned.

I'd been sitting on the floor with my back to the wall for about a minute, which was as long as my side had allowed, and I'd spent most of that minute deciding how to ask the question. There was no good way. So I'd gone with the bad way, which was fast, because a bad hand played quickly is still a bad hand but at least it's over.

Kira didn't answer. She was standing over me with her arms folded and her claws in, and she was doing the thing she did when she was deciding how much truth to spend.

"Say it again," she said.

"Odds the body's mine."

Burn. Not a flare. A steady, patient heat, the way a stove gets when you've left it on and forgotten.

"That's not a lie you're telling me," Kira said. "That's a question you're asking yourself."

"I don't ask myself questions. I ask other people. It's cheaper."

"You want the truth." She crouched, and her knees cracked, and she looked tired in a way I hadn't seen on her — not weak, just worn, like a blade that had been sharpened too many times. "Here's what I know. You died on my floor. I felt the last of you go out. Then you came back, and you came back wrong — you came back talking, and the collar took to you, and the collar does not take to people. The collar takes to debts."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning the iron knows something I don't." She reached out and tapped the collar with one claw, and it rang like a struck bell, low and ugly. "It was made to hold a specific person. Not a person in general. A specific one. Somebody built that thing for a name."

"And it likes me."

"It fits you." She said it like an accusation.

Kirihime had not moved from the corner. She was still holding her hands out in front of her, palm up, the line of red gone black, and she was staring at it the way you stare at a wound that isn't yours.

"There's a sigil for this," she said. "I know there is. I can feel the shape of it in my teeth. I just—" Her jaw worked. "It's behind something. Like a word on the tip of your tongue, if the tongue had been cut out."

"Then don't remember it," I said. "Ask the room instead."

"The room?"

"The room where I died. Where I woke up. Take me back."

Kira's hand closed on my shoulder, hard. "No."

"Why not?"

"Because something is looking for you and I'd rather it kept looking at the wrong door."

I looked up at her. She was close, and her face had gone flat and careful, and her thumb had found the edge of the collar and was resting there, not quite pulling.

"Odds you're protecting me," I said.

"High."

"Odds you're protecting something else."

The thumb stopped.

"Don't," she said.

"Odds you tell me what you're not telling me."

She kissed me.

It was the third one and I was starting to build a theory about them. The first was a claim. The second was a seal. This one was a shut up, and she did it the way she did everything, which was with her whole weight behind it and no apology. Her hand at the collar, dragging me up, her mouth on mine, her teeth finding the split in my lip from yesterday and pressing until it opened again and she tasted it and made a low sound in her chest that was not quite a growl and not quite anything I had a name for.

The collar flared. Warm. Wrong. Wonderful.

She pulled back just enough to breathe on my mouth. "You want the truth, gambler? Here it is. I don't know what you are. And I am not going to lose the only interesting thing that's happened to me in a century because you got curious in a doorway. So you sit. You heal. And when the seven days are up, I'll tell you everything I've got and you can decide whether to hate me for it."

"Seven days is a long time to sit."

"It's four days." She let go of my collar. "You've already spent three."

"Then it's four days for someone to find the wrong door."

And then the room got cold, and the candles bent, and the doorway opened.

Not thin, this time. Not wrong. Open. A door in the middle of the floorboards, laid flat, with a stair going down that did not go down into the cellar I had counted steps through on my hands and knees. The stair went down into a light that was grey and steady and had no source. And a woman came up out of it.

She was tall and she was thin and she was wearing a coat that had been patched many times by someone who cared more about it than about how it looked. Her face was the face of a woman who had been beautiful once and had then spent a very long time doing something else. And she was carrying a blade, and the blade was wet, and the wet was not water.

"Zansho," Kira said. Her claws came out, slow, one by one. "You're not welcome here."

"I'm never welcome anywhere." Zansho's voice was dry and warm and exactly the voice of a woman who has learned to enjoy being disliked. She wasn't looking at Kira. She was looking at me. "There he is. The one who died."

"You've got the wrong room," I said.

"I've got the right room." She came up the last step and the door in the floor closed behind her like a mouth. "I've got the right room and the wrong body, which is the whole trouble, isn't it. Stand up."

"No."

"Stand up."

The collar burned.

I stood up. My side hated it. I stood up anyway, because the collar had asked and I had noticed that the collar did not ask twice, and because Zansho was looking at me in a way I recognized. It was the look a card sharp gives the deck before the cut — not hostile, not kind, just reading.

She walked a circle around me. Her boots made no sound on the boards. When she came around the front again she put two fingers under my chin and turned my head left, then right, then she crouched a little and looked up into my eyes from below, and whatever she saw made her go still.

"Ah," she said.

"Ah what."

"You're not in it properly." She straightened. "The body died. You know that. You know the heart stopped, you watched her count it, four minutes and eleven seconds. What nobody's told you is that the body died for a reason. It was supposed to be empty. It was supposed to be a door. Somebody cut a hole in the world and put a vessel in it, and the vessel was meant to receive a specific passenger."

"Odds that passenger was me," I said.

"Low," Zansho said.

The collar went cold.

She saw it. Her eyebrows went up. "Oh, that's interesting. The iron agrees with me. Good. Then I'll tell you the rest for free." She stepped closer. "You're a squatter, gambler. You climbed into a coat that was hanging on a hook. Whoever was supposed to wear this body — and I know who, I know the shape of his name, I've seen his ghost looking for his skin — he's still out there, and he's getting angry, and the Correction Unit that came through your room last night wasn't hunting you. It was hunting the wrong one wearing the body. That's you. That's always been you."

Kirihime made a small sound.

"And the bloodline check," Zansho went on, "failed because there's no bloodline in that body to match. You're not an heir. You're not a Player. You're a stowaway." She smiled, and it was not a nice smile. "That's the best thing I've heard in fifty years."

"Get out," Kira said.

"I'll go." Zansho was already turning, and the door in the floor was already opening. "One thing, gambler. The ghost is going to find you eventually, and when he does he'll want his skin back, and I have seen what happens to a soul that gets pulled out of a coat it's been wearing too long. It doesn't come apart clean."

"What's his name?"

She stopped at the top of the stair. Looked back over her shoulder. And for a moment her warm dry voice went somewhere colder, and she said:

"You already know it. You just haven't said it out loud yet, because if you say it out loud the collar will burn and you'll have to admit you weren't chosen for this. You were left over."

Then the door closed and she was gone and the candles came back up.

Kira had her hand on my collar again. Her eyes were very close and very bright.

"You're staying," she said.

"Odds I have a choice."

"Low."

She kissed me — hard, and quick, and this one had fear in it, that dangerous vulnerable thing I file every time I see it, her hand shaking against my throat, her mouth too rough because too rough was the only way she could say it. When she pulled back she said, "Whatever's looking for that skin, it has to go through me. Say it back."

"Whatever's looking for that skin," I said, "has to go through you."

The collar stayed cool.

And downstairs, in the dark, something knocked on the shop's front door — three times, patient, and then a voice I did not know said, clearly and without hurry:

"Open up. I want my body back."