TAMING MY KILLER DEMON

Sigil of the Shown Death

Chapter 7

"—three steps," I said. "Three steps to the door and back and you don't move from that counter. If I make it, you tell me what you saw in the mirror in Season One and never said out loud."

Kira's hand was still flat on the counter, holding herself up, and her eyes came up slow.

"Two steps," she said.

"Three."

"Two, and if you fall I don't catch you."

"Odds you catch me," I said.

"High." She said it like a curse.

The collar burned. I took the first step.

Behind me, Mukanshin had not moved, and the tiredness was coming off him in slow waves, and my knees wanted the floor the way a drunk wants a bottle. I took the second step. The window was three feet away and the shape beyond it was patient and grey.

I took the third step and put my hand on the glass.

"Odds you're a messenger," I said.

"I'm a herald." The voice was flat as a closed book, and the face beyond the glass was flat too — a woman's face, unremarkable, the kind you'd forget while looking at it. "The Council notes an irregularity. The body is occupied by a stowaway. The note is counting. The fourth is unbound."

"Which fourth?"

"The one you haven't got." The herald's eyes went past me, to Kira, and something like a smile moved without arriving. "The Council offers no help. The Council offers a warning. When the count runs out, the Council will not intervene. It will only record."

"Odds you've come to gloat," I said.

"Low. I've come to observe." Her face began to thin, going transparent at the edges like paper held to a candle. "Find the fourth. The note is not the only thing counting."

Then she was gone, and there was only street, and my hand on cold glass, and the count on the letter going quietly down.

Kira was beside me before I heard her move. Her hand closed on my collar and turned me.

"Two steps," she said.

"Three."

"You fell on the second. I caught you."

"Odds I remember it differently," I said.

"Low." Her thumb found the iron. It had been shaking since Mukanshin came through the wall and it had not stopped, and she knew I'd seen it, and she hated that I'd seen it, and she was still holding me. "Zansho. That's the fourth. She came to the room and she left and she told us the truth for free, which means she wants something and hasn't named the price."

"Everybody wants something."

"She wants you, gambler. She looked at you the way a woman looks at a knife she's thinking about buying." Her mouth came down on the corner of my jaw, on the bruise she'd already put there, and her teeth closed on it, and the collar flared. "So when we find her, you keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking."

"Odds that works," I said.

"Low," she said, and kissed me properly, hard and quick and tasting of blood and stubbornness, and then she let me go and said, "Kirihime. Can you find her?"

Kirihime was on her feet. Her hands were still held out in front of her, and she was looking at them, and she said, "I can find anything I've forgotten. She's not forgotten. She's hidden." She looked up. "But she left a door in the floor, and doors remember."

---

The door in the floor opened onto a street I had not seen — a low grey street with a well in the middle, and a woman sitting on the well's edge with her boots off and her feet in the water.

Zansho did not look up. "You brought the sick one. And the sad one. And the loud one."

"I brought the family," I said.

That got her. Her head came up and she looked at me for a long moment, and her dry warm voice went somewhere careful.

"Careful with that word," she said. "Families are debts with better manners."

"We're short on time, not on manners." I sat down on the well's other edge. Kira made a sound; I ignored it. "You told me I'm a stowaway. You told me the ghost wants his skin. You didn't tell me why you came to the room at all."

"I came to look at a corpse that sat up." She pulled one foot out of the water and looked at it, as though it interested her. "I've looked at a great many corpses. None of them ever sat up."

"You've been at this a while."

"Fifty years." She said it without weight. "I show people how they die. That's the gift. That's the whole of it. I put a hand on a man and he sees the last moment of his life, and then he spends the rest of his life trying not to be there. It's an honest trade. It's the only honest trade." She looked at me. "You want to know why I'm here. Fine. I'm here because I showed your death to the man in that body eleven years ago, and then the man died anyway."

The collar burned.

"Say that again," I said, and my voice had gone somewhere flat.

"He came to me the week before he died and asked to see it. I showed him. He watched himself go out — four minutes and eleven seconds, a floor, a demon standing over him — and he thanked me, and he paid me in a memory, and he walked out that door, and then he did it anyway." Zansho's eyes did not move. "He walked into his own death on purpose, gambler. He knew. So either he was the bravest man I ever met, or he was setting a table, and I have spent eleven years not knowing which."

Kirihime sat down on the cobbles. Mukanshin had not come through the door; the street behind us was empty, and I understood he was waiting at the shop, and the letter was still counting, and I had a question I was going to hate.

"Show me," I said.

Zansho's eyebrows went up.

"No," Kira said.

"Show me my death."

"You've already died once." Kira's hand closed on my shoulder. "You don't need to watch it in advance."

"Odds the ghost watched his," I said, "and then walked into it. High. Odds there's something in the last moment I need to see. High. Odds I'm going to hate it."

"You don't have to gamble on everything."

"I do, actually. It's the only thing I've ever been good at."

Zansho put her feet back in the water and stood up. She was taller than she looked sitting down. She reached out, and her hand hovered in front of my face, and she said, "This costs. Not me — you. I don't give it away. I take a memory, and not a small one. That's the blood sigil. That's the price."

"Take it."

"Don't." Kira's voice had gone low and dangerous.

"Take it," I said.

Zansho's palm came down on my forehead.

The street went white, then black, then very specific. A floor. Boards with a gap in them. A candle guttering. A body on the floor with my face, my hands, my cut lip, and a woman standing over it with claws the color of wet slate, counting.

"Four minutes and eleven seconds," the woman said.

And the body on the floor opened its eyes.

Not the way I'd opened mine. Wrong — too fast, and the pupils had gone the color of old milk and then cleared, and the face did not look surprised. The face looked satisfied. And the mouth said, in a voice I recognized because it was mine:

"Took you long enough. Now pay up."

Zansho took her hand back. The street came in around me. My knees went and Kira had me before I hit the cobbles, her arm across my chest, her face white.

"What did you see," she said. "What did you see."

I got my breath. I got my hand on her arm. And I said, "The body wasn't empty when I arrived. Something was still in it, and it was waiting for me."

The collar stayed cool.

Zansho sat back down on the well's edge and put her feet in the water.

"Now you know," she said, "why I've been watching for eleven years. And why I'll only join a man who can pay a debt that isn't his." She looked up. "Come back when you've got something worth trading. And gambler — the count on that letter went down while you were in the vision. Down. Not up. Ask yourself why."

Kira turned my face to hers and pressed her mouth to my temple and held it there, and her breath was not steady, and she said, very quietly, "You're not going back to her alone."

"Say it back," I said.

"I'm not letting you go alone. Ever. That's the whole of it."

The collar went warm.

And the letter in my pocket, which had been counting down, said in a clear small voice like a bell: "Third hour restored. Claim contested. Correction Unit dispatched."