Ink

He’d mounded his handkerchief on top of mine, but the dark blood bloomed and spread across it.

“Give me the brush!” he shouted. I dropped to my hands and knees and searched for it in the grass.

A movement blurred where the horse had been, and I looked up. A thick coil of giant snake, wider than the belly of the stallion, wrapped around itself over and over, so that the mound was taller than Tomohiro. The jagged outlines of the snake soaked into long tendrils of ink toward the center of its crackly skin, and as it wound around, it looked like it slithered in two directions at once. It raised its huge head, antlers rising from the top of its silver snout.

The dragon Tomohiro had drawn.

At first I couldn’t hear anything but my own scream. The beast stared at me with vacant eyes, its whiskers drooping low below its lips and hanging limp in the drenching rain. Swirls of ink lifted from its whole body, like steam off a horse in a morning mist.

“Katie, the brush!” Tomohiro shouted, but I stood paralyzed as the dragon stared at me.

Tomohiro moved his left hand desperately through the wet grasses. The handkerchiefs he’d let go of dropped to the ground without the pressure of his hand to hold them there, and the blood streaked down his wrist and along his slender fingers.

The dragon lifted up like a boa ready to strike. Huge claws appeared from the mass of its coiled body, and it pressed them into the earth, bending its long legs. Ink-colored bristles spiked down its spine and twisted into sinewy wings, which it flapped back and forth as it got ready to pounce.

“Tomo!” I shrieked as his fingers closed around the paintbrush.

The dragon leaped up, uncoiling into the air. Tomohiro dove toward the scraps of the page and drew ugly lines through any he could find. High above, the dragon screeched and its leg fell off, dropping in the clearing with an ugly thud and a cloud of ink dust. Tomohiro found another soaked scrap and sliced through it; one of the bristled wings crumbled and the dragon veered sideways in the sky.

Tomohiro flipped over two more pieces before he found the neck. He carved through it in one quick stroke.

The dragon plummeted from the sky. The coils shook the ground as they hit, the tongue lolling out of its mouth before it turned to shimmering dust.

Tomohiro reached into his bag and grabbed his kendo headband, pressing it into the gash as he raced over to me. I fell to my knees in the mud and sobbed while he flung his arms around me.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he cried over and over into the soaked tangle of my hair. “Gomen, gomen, gomen!”

The rain poured down from the sky, washing over the shimmering dust, soaking the paper and the notebook until the ink blurred beyond recognition. We clung to each other as our drenched clothes clung to our own skin, and as terrified as I was to let go, I was just as scared to hold on.

Chapter 11

The blood finally stopped, Tomohiro’s kendo headband stained so dark I could barely read the black kanji painted on it. The Twofold Path of the Pen and Sword, it said. Only, to Tomo hiro the pen and sword might as well be the same thing.

It was a deep gash in his wrist and probably needed stitches, but that would mean explaining to his dad and the doctors, so I knew he wouldn’t go to the hospital.

We didn’t speak for a while, sitting under the trees for shelter as the rain poured. There wasn’t a question I could think of that encompassed everything I wanted to ask. Tomohiro sat beside me, rubbing the headband into his wrist and slicking his dripping bangs behind his ears. I was exhausted and just wanted to go home, but I didn’t know what to tell Diane, and so I stayed, trapped in the hell that had once been our paradise.

“What now?” I said, when the silence became too much to bear.

“Let’s hope the storm gave us cover,” he said. “That and not too many people live around here. They’ll say the dragon was a trick of the light. A flash of lightning against the clouds, that kind of thing.”

“Really?”

“I hope so. It didn’t lift too high up in the clouds.”

“Tomo.”

“Hmm?”

“I told you to stop drawing, but you didn’t listen.”

Tomohiro’s head slumped forward. “It was strange,” he said. “You were right beside me, but your voice sounded a mile away. I couldn’t hear what you were saying. It all sounded…fuzzy to me.”

“You have to stop drawing.”

He said nothing.

“Don’t you get it? This was almost Koji all over again. Is this really worth your life?”

He lifted his head slowly, staring at the trampled grass where the dragon’s corpse was disintegrating.

“It’s worth my life,” he said. “But it isn’t worth yours.”

“How can you say that? It’s not worth yours, either.”

He shook his head. “Even if I stopped drawing, this…power, curse, whatever the hell it is. It won’t go away. I’m a Kami, Katie. This is what I am. My nightmares are so real I could die in my sleep. The kanji I write on my entrance exams could cut open someone’s wrist. A lot of the characters have the radical for sword in them, you know. The ink is everywhere I go, and sometimes I…sometimes I lose myself, like when I couldn’t hear you. I’m marked for this darkness. This is who I am.”

He lowered his head. “My only hope is to learn to control it.”

“Then maybe I—maybe I need to go.”

“What?”

“Because I’m making things worse. I’m some sort of catalyst. And I don’t know why.”

“It—it might be more dangerous if you leave.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The way I feel about you, Katie,” he said, his brown eyes searching mine. “What if it’s reacting to my emotions or something? If you left, I might— I mean, the Kami power might overtake me. What if I completely lose it, if the nightmares finally get me? But as long as you’re safe. It’s for the best if the ink destroys me anyway. If I don’t wake up, then I can’t hurt you.”

I stared at him. Did I mean that much to him?

“Too dramatic?” he said with a laugh, shaking his head.

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s not supposed to be. It’s lonely being a monster.”

“You’re not a monster.”

He held up his blood-soaked wrist like it was proof. “I am.

But it’s not damn fair.” The rain clung to spikes of his hair, dripping off the tips of it into the grass. “It’s not just the ink hunting you, Katie. I’m hunting you. I want you like I’ve never wanted anything.”

Every part of me caught fire. Every nerve pulsed.

“I was trying to push you away, messing with you in the courtyard. I almost couldn’t go through with it. You’ll think I’m such an asshole, but when I saw you—god. I couldn’t get you out of my head. And then you climbed that tree and shouted my name. You weren’t afraid of me. You didn’t back down. I felt like you could see me, the real me. Myu was a reminder that I was too dangerous to be anything but alone and half-dead. You made me alive again, Katie. If I have to burn for that, then I’ll light the damn match myself.”

“Tomo,” I said. My mind whirled with everything he’d said.

“I know. I’m sorry. I should keep my mouth shut.”

“No, I—”

My keitai chimed then, its happy metal tune so out of place in the soaked clearing. Tomohiro pressed his back into the rough trunk of a tree while I reached for my phone.

The ID flashed Diane. There was no way I could answer it. I sat there frozen,