One second, she is lying frozen, and the next she hurls herself out of bed. Her fingers chatter like teeth, which makes lighting the sputtering candle a long and horrible task.
Then, the candle is lit; she holds it high. Her mind numbs over with panic as her eyes dart around the room, seeking the shadowed corners for any shape crouching beyond the shallow pool of light.
The room is empty. The only movement comes from the patterned shadows, woven by clouds in the moonlight.
Sinking back onto the low bed, Hiyori sets the candle down at her feet. She pulls her knees up to her chest, puts her head between them, and makes herself breathe. Her ribs expand.
No one is hurting her. No one is hunting her.
But for a moment, she is nine years old again. Nine years old, and shrouded in terror and mist on the burning roadside.
She thinks for a second, as soon as her rational thinking returns.
She could return to the shrines—to the crowds of people who are still happy and celebrating among them. She could lose herself in them and hope that whatever voice she heard would lose itself as well.
But instead, she lies back down. She pulls the covers all the way up to her neck, and stares into the candle's spitting flame.
As she shivers, blinking hard and quickly, Hiyori is not sure which is worse: that he has found her, somehow—after all these years—or that he was never there at all. That she is alone…alone, with only his voice in her head for company.
/
She wakes up, only thinking that she would have liked to stay asleep a little longer. She wakes up to someone scolding her.
"Did you want to burn the place down?!"
Her grandmother points a reprimanding finger at the little pool of gray candle wax.
"Oh—I'm sorry!"
Hiyori scrambles to clean up the mess of dripped wax, and while she does, the memory of the voice comes back to her.
It had been Nobu. But her dreams afterward had not held nightmares. She did not feel his rotten breath on her during her dreams—not this time.
She had felt…something else. Her cheeks heat up. Her dreams had been been pale cheekbones, and sharp shoulder blades under her fingers…and blue—impossible, inescapable blue.
She would take it over the wine-colored voice any day.
"Are you really going to clean that up, or will you make an old woman get down on her knees and scrub floors while you sit around starry-eyed?"
Hiyori snaps back to herself.
"Sorry again! Sorry."
/
She decides that she is done feeling helpless.
The treatment she receives from her brother—even her grandmother—after the New Year's festival is enough to make that decision for her.
"You shouldn't stress yourself," Masaomi says, taking a parcel from her as she walks home from the market. "You might faint again."
"I won't!"
"Do you really want to risk it?" he presses, and she snatches the parcel back.
"Yes, I do. Because it won't happen."
Her brother suddenly stops in the middle of the path. Hiyori doesn't notice at first, then nearly trips on her hem when turning around. He faces her with a serious look.
"Something happened to you at the festival."
She stares at him, then covers the short unevenness of her breath with a cough.
"Nothing happened." Lie.
She swallows.
"I thought I saw someone familiar. That's all."
Masaomi gives her a deeply troubled look, and she feels a stab of guilt. She can't just—tell him. Can she?
"You're different," he says, quietly. "I don't know if that makes me happy or not."
Hiyori turns back to the path without answering him, shifting her weight uneasily between her feet. She may very well be different.
Not many people can say they have come face-to-face with both a demon, and a god.
/
Hiyori finds herself cornered by her two best friends on her way out to the edge of the town.
"I'd ask if you're going off to do something scandalous—but now I know that's not the case, I almost wish I was still ignorant," Yama says. Her smile can only be described as malevolent.
"What—?" Hiyori asks, her voice breaking.
Ami pokes her shoulder teasingly.
"I don't know. I think kicking stumps and flailing around with bamboo spears is about as scandalous as Hiyori-chan is going to get."
"How did you—" Hiyori swallows, tries to reassemble the fragments of her composure. "H-how long have you—"
"Oh please, Hiyori-chan. We've known since the start."
Yama smirks, then takes pity on her.
"I saw bruises on your arms—I think it was just a few days after you started—and, like any respectable friends, Ami-chan and I followed you out and saw that ridiculous display you were putting on. Are you hoping to become a court attraction for the emperor?"
Ami cackles as Yama strikes a ridiculous pose—more like someone who has a bad stomach cramp than a trained fighter in battle.
"The amazing Iki Hiyori—watch her wrestle a wild bull to the ground!"
Hiyori's face grows hot, but she snorts with laughter at their enthusiasm.
"Do not tell my grandmother," she says, sternly. "I'm warning you."
Ami waves her off, while Yama fights off the last of her giggles.
"Have fun then, Hiyori-chan. Just don't get carried off by a yokai!"
"She could fight off a yokai with those moves, for certain," Yama snorts, wiping her eyes.
Hiyori sticks her tongue out at them as she waves goodbye.
The road out of town narrows into a cart lane, then—about a ten-minute walk from the last outbuilding—the wide lane sprouts a nearly invisible footpath. Hiyori follows this smaller avenue toward a quiet, bamboo-curtained glen. Stopping underneath one of the largest trees, she pulls out from a shallow burial site a bundle wrapped in cloth. Keeping herself relatively hidden among the tall, shadowy stalks, she strips off her outer garment and changes into the loose, lightweight attire. Nothing like this came from her closet: she had had to craft it herself from old clothes that had once belonged to her brother.
She's been training herself in self-defense for these past few months, keeping her unschooled efforts entirely restricted to this shadow-soaked grove.
The strain of physical activity takes up too much of her mind for her to think about much else. When her muscles are tight and aching—her skin blooming with bruises and the rough hints of new callouses—her body's discomfort chases away anything that might worry her during the day.
It exhausts her too much to think about anything that might visit her at night.
Feeling free and mobile, Hiyori stretches her arms and shoulders high, popping her neck from side to side. It may be an unladylike form of exercise, but she doesn't really care. If kicking tree stumps and flailing with bamboo spears will do anything toward destroying the feeling of terrible vulnerability—of exposure—that has followed her for the past eight years—then she isn't about to complain about the bruising.
A breathless half-hour later, Hiyori sinks breathlessly down next to the trunk of that same tree, her mouth parched and joints complaining.
"A—a break," she gasps out, to whatever wildlife may be listening. "Then, maybe—a little more."
She's still unhappy with her agility, though her speed is growing more impressive. Her secret practices can only get her so far. It's not as though she has a teacher.
During her few minutes of rest, she notices the silence. It's a weird, total silence—completely absent of wind, or insect, or animal. Hiyori's heart jumps ahead of itself a few beats.
"Hello?" she says, into the silence.
There's no response. She's still alone. But the air is waiting for something.
Quickly, she strips off her loose clothes and changes back into her normal wear. The narrow footpath isn't far off, but the long, straight shadows of bamboo seem to stretch even more—reaching dark fingers out for her. Her breath burns in her lungs when she reaches the path.
As she takes a quick pace back toward town and nothing unusual happens, her muscles slowly begin to relax again. There really was nothing there with her. The footpath joins with the larger road, and she begins to hear the distant noise of town and foot-traffic.
As soon as her paranoia begins to taper off entirely, Hiyori hears a distinct rustling from off to her left. She stops. The rustling stops.
Her pulse is so loud—it pounds behind her eyes.
"Hello?"
Something moves amidst the thinly clumped patches of trees next to the path. The shape is dark, and quick. Before Hiyori can view it clearly, she gets the impression of a predatory cat—it moves with the same deadly grace.
"W-who's there?" she calls out, forcing herself to sound braver than she is. She plants her feet wide in the middle of the road, chest drawn up and spine arched to communicate confidence. Hopefully it's convincing.
At first, no one appears. Then, when she shows no signs of backing down, there's a bit more rustling, and the newcomer emerges from the shadows.
Hiyori's breath flies out of her like a bird.
"You."
/
She thought she had seen the last of him.
It's so unexpected—so entirely, entirely out of her realm of reference, that she can't begin to process his appearance.
When she does, the circumstances of their last meeting assail her.
She had been so forward. Humiliatingly so.
Her knees hit the ground with a soft thump. She trains her eyes no higher than the ground in front of his feet, but she hears his low noise of surprise.
"What are you doing?" he asks, sounding genuinely baffled.
"Allow me to apologize for my behavior when we last met," she blurts out, still staring at the dirt. "It is no excuse—but I was overwhelmed—"
"You remember that?" he interrupts.
The boy from her memory walks toward her with the caution of a wild animal approaching a wounded hunter, and she ventures to look up again. She nods.
"But…it's been months," he says, quietly. Disbelievingly. "Why do you keep remembering me?"
"Why would I not?"
He looks down at her, and before she can name the fleeting expression on his strange, inhuman face—it is gone again.
"Because no one ever has."
/
"Gods don't exist the same way humans do," he tells her. Instead of making her get up, he simply sits right down on the road in front of her, crossing his legs and staring with disconcerting intensity into her face. She leans back on her heels when it becomes obvious he intends to have this conversation with her—right here, right now.
"What do you mean?"
"Children and animals can see us just fine," he explains, rolling a stray pebble under his fingers. "But regular people have a hard time remembering us. If they do, it's only as faceless strangers. That's why…you recognizing me now is…unexpected."
The pebble pauses under his thumb.
"Well, it wasn't easy," Hiyori admits. "I might not have been able to remember you for as long as I did—without you giving me your name."
He shoots her a sharp glance; she'll never get used to a direct gaze from him. It's too easy to recognize him as the un-human that he is whenever she sees his eyes.
"My name?" he asks, sounding a little apprehensive.
She nods.
"Yatogami."
Hiyori could be imagining it. But she thinks he relaxes a bit, when she speaks that name.
"About that." He clears his throat. "Um. Kind of…a mouthful, right? You can just call me: Yato."
Her tongue silently experiments with the syllables. Ya-to. Such an un-extraordinary name, for someone who claims to be a god.
"All right, Yato…" she trails off, then hurriedly adds: "-sama."
Apparently, gods can blush.
She decides to forego the honorific. After all, they are both sitting in the middle of the road; he lowered himself to speak with her. She may as well acknowledge that equality.
"Yato," she corrects herself, quietly. His face falls.
"Yato-sama was nice," he says, with a hint of wistfulness, and Hiyori finds herself stifling a giggle.
In the distance, there's a sound of wheels, and a rising puff of dust from an approaching cart. Hiyori stands up again, and Yato follows suit. They stand facing each other for a few seconds, and as he looks at her with an unnameable expression, she feels something odd and fluttery in her chest.
After so many years trying to decide what to ask him first, she finds that there isn't a single question on her tongue.
"It was nice to meet you," she says, starting to brush the rocks and dust off her knees. Then, she pauses. "By the way—why did you come back?"
This time, the blush is on her face. It's a presumptuous question, and she's not quite sure how it managed to escape her lips.
Yato doesn't seem to notice her embarrassment. Instead, his gaze drops to the ground, and the soft curve that had found his lips flattens again.
"I'm looking for something around here," he says. "But I don't think I'll find it."
Hiyori waits for something to occur to her: something silver-tongued and charming and full of encouragement.
Instead, she just says: "Oh."
Then, flailing—"Well, I-I'll see you, then!"
She turns around and starts walking away quickly, trying to hide the heat boiling into her cheeks. She doesn't have the nerve to turn around to witness what he's made of her awkward exit.
So she doesn't see his lips part in shock, or the tinge of pink that appears again, in high spots on his cheekbones.
She doesn't hear him say, very quietly: "You might…Hiyori."
/
As she arrives back in the main part of town, Hiyori walks rapidly past the main shrines. The few largest ones are loaded with requests and decorations, and she wonders…why she's never seen his name anywhere.
There are no stories, no songs about the Yatogami. There are certainly no shrines.
A thought occurs to her—so fleeting and foolish that she almost tosses it away at once. But it burrows, tugging at her attention until she can't ignore it anymore—until it is a fully fledged idea. What if.
It's only fair. Since she was nine years old, she's been remembering him—praying to him, in her own way.
And—after all—he did save her life.
And—after all—she will probably never see him again.
/
Hiyori moves through the rest of the week in a half-stupor. Every few seconds, another moment of her conversation with Yato will replay in her mind, robbing her of her concentration during the most mundane tasks.
From her imperfect memories of eight years ago, Hiyori realizes there's something different about him now. Even at her young age, one look at him had told her exactly what he was. Magatsukami. Very solitary—very dangerous. Death had walked in his footsteps.
The boy she had talked to, as both of them sat in the middle of a dusty road, had not fit that description. He had been just that: a boy.
And he looked like—maybe—he was trying his best to forget something. Just like she is.
/
A month or so after this encounter, the god named Yato fails to make an appearance anywhere but in her memory.
Hiyori comes into the house shortly after sunset, along with a gust of unexpectedly warm air. She expects the place to still be empty—but, after hearing a soft noise from deeper in the house, she concludes her grandmother must have returned home earlier than expected.
"I'm back," she says, setting her packages down inside the door and brushing her hands off on her clothes. No one answers. Her grandmother mustn't have heard her come in.
"It's so dark in here," she comments, walking over to the low table. She expects her grandmother's voice to tell her to light the lamp.
"Yes," says a gentle, musical voice. A man's. "The sun set early today."
Hiyori's stomach turns to water.
She is nine years old: huddled in the bottom of a wooden cart, shrouded in mist.
"Not even a scream, little sweet?" asks the voice, slithering like a river of ink across the floor. "Can it be that you were…expecting me?"
All at once, her muscles regain their abilities. She flings herself to the far end of the room, toward the door. Her one thought is to get out again, among other people—
"Stop."
Of course, she stops. Her skin has turned to iron, caging her within herself.
All that work to learn how to fight—to get stronger—and now when it matters, her body won't let her move.
He walks behind her; his footsteps are soft, just like his voice. He walks around to her left, keeping just outside her range of vision. Straining, she manages to catch a vague imprint of his figure out of her periphery.
"I'd love to talk to you, but if you insist on running, then this will have to suffice. I just wanted to see you, little sweet…and for you to see me."
Then come out from behind me.
"You're probably wondering why I am staying out of sight. Well, to be honest, I'm a little shy."
The predatory smile in the words curls around her neck, raising goosebumps.
"These last eight years haven't been all that kind to me, little sweet. I was rather worried you wouldn't like my appearance."
He sighs heavily, in apparent disappointment. She feels it on her neck, how close he stands to her.
"I suppose you're right. The outside of things doesn't matter all that much."
Something light moves on her neck—a displacement of air—a deep inhale. He's sniffing her throat. Hiyori's stomach convulses, and she tastes acidic bitterness.
"However…you've only grown more beautiful."
She waits for it, and—yes—there it is. A talon, beneath her hair. Sweeping down the center of her neck. A talon, followed by hot, rotting breath. The air quivers wetly against the back of her neck, and everything in her gut jumps horribly.
The voice behind her loses its silky persuasion. It trembles.
"How did you steal her face, and her voice, and her spirit? How did I get so lucky…?"
Terror and confusion battle it out in Hiyori's head. Who is he talking about?
Then, he asks—"Would you like to see me?"
It's nearly whispered against her skin. Then, with a rough, phlegmy chuckle: "You have to promise not to scream."
He steps away from behind her. She senses him circling around, drawing out a theatric reveal. Her trapped pulse hammers inside her temples.
"Remember, little sweet. Trust me—and don't scream."
Hiyori thinks afterward that he must have been using magic to keep his body together.
The thing that reveals itself could not be alive. It could not move, or breathe, save through supernatural intervention.
Her first impression is of a loose-jointed puppet, dragging its feet through the pool of moonlight into the shortened circumference of her sight. One of its arms is noticeably longer than the other—as though all its bones had been thinned and elongated. The fingernails are just as long, just as yellow and curving as she remembers. But the face is the worst.
One eye is gone, leaving a hollow, skeletal socket. The skin, stretched tightly over the architecture of a disintegrating skeleton, looks like the flesh of a corpse. Limp, hair, as dry as snakeskin, clings to his forehead.
Despite his body's defiance of anything living—anything natural—he smiles with those gray, tombstone teeth—a smile of hunger, and lust, and weird, creeping wrongness.
"Not pretty, is it?" he asks her, and that smile widens.
Hiyori's legs ache from the position she's frozen in. She can only take shallow breaths, and the dim room begins to blur at the edges. But in the last few moments, she's felt something infinitely worse than her physical discomfort: an insistent, finger-thin pressure inside her own mind, prodding. It spools into her ear, probing the recesses of her brain, along with Nobu's voice.
"Your pretty skin has some worms under it, right? Like that magatsukami you hold so precious in your memory. You'll have to forget him."
Hiyori cannot react. She cannot gasp.
Nobu begins to talk again—rhythmically, lyrically—more like singing than speaking. A twisted lullaby.
"You wouldn't adore him so much if you knew all the things he hides. Do you know what a 'nora' is, little sweet? Of course you don't. But maybe you have heard of the gods who take payment to kill innocent people. Have you heard of what they'll do for the most meagre of sums? They'll skin children. They'll torture whole towns—whole cities. They don't even need a reason."
He steps closer, grinning crazily in her face. And then, she does see it.
She sees it—everything he tells her is suddenly before her eyes. Built in thick columns of ash, the landscape is in front of her. It smells like fire, and copper, and shit. Bones spike from the remains of buildings, flesh still hanging from them in tattered, dripping banners. The smoke is thick, and smells like gas and fat.
Her eyes sting. The smoke is too strong, and too thick, and it smells like everything she's already lost.
Her eyes are stinging still—not with smoke, but with salt—and tremors crawl up and down the whole, frozen length of her body.
"Have you heard of the creatures who start wars just so they can fuck the corpses left on the battlefield?" Nobu hisses, invading her with his presence—his mind into hers. Hiyori feels a tortured whine leave her throat.
Then, the slick fingers in her ears withdraw. Nobu is breathing hard through his wreck of a nose. His one remaining eye bores into hers, and the proximity of his breath nearly chokes her. Their bodies brush as he leans to whisper in her ear:
"Have you thought of him—this magatsukami of yours—touching you?"
Nearly against her cheek, his voice is hypnotic: wine, and honey, and poison. He pulls away, looking for her reaction.
Even the curse he's laid on her cannot stop the bright heat flooding her face. Hiyori cannot speak; she cannot say, "no, he is not mine."
She cannot say, "yes, I have thought it."
"See?" He responds in satisfaction to her silent confusion. "You have something rotten in you, despite your lovely appearance. Remember this, when you think of him: his hands may be beautiful, but they have been dipped in blood. You don't want him to kiss you, little sweet. His mouth is full of worms."
Nobu's smile stretches wider: a grotesque crescent that pulls his skin over skewering bones.
"You have chosen a demon as your god."
He is close—so close that his spittle flies into her face. His breath is hot, and as putrid as an open grave. And then, as close as he is to her, he is gone—
At once, Hiyori's legs liquify under her. She drops like a stone into the ocean.
/
She is in a nightmare: a familiar one that smells like smoke and mist.
"Wake up."
—But this voice belongs only to her good dreams—and the smell is not smoke—it's something else entirely—
"Wake up!"
She wants to answer it. She doesn't want the voice's owner to worry about her.
"Hey! Hiyori!"
He's never said her name before.
"Come on, please wake up."
Her eyelids fly open. Wherever she is, it's warm. And blue.
"…Yato?"
Hiyori thought he had been holding her—but now she sees that's not true. After her eyes and limbs adjust, she sees that she's on the hard floor. Yato is there, kneeling next to her—but his face is certainly not worried.
If anything, he's annoyed.
"You really fall down a lot, don't you?" he asks.
Despite her disorientation and shock, Hiyori bites her tongue in sudden irritation.
"And you really like barging into people's homes without asking!"
"I was just making sure you were all right."
He says it like it's a matter of course—like she couldn't be trusted on her own without getting into some sort of trouble. Hiyori scrambles to sit upright, enraged by his patronizing tone—upset even more by the fact that she had, in fact, been in real danger.
Shuddering faintly, she pushes Nobu to the back of her mind.
"I didn't ask you to check on me," she snaps. "And I don't want you to do it anymore. I'm fine—I'm great on my own."
Yato laughs, not unkindly.
"Oh, right! I forgot you were a fierce warrior."
She gasps, clutching her sleeves close to her. Heat rushes into her face, all the way up to her hairline.
"You saw…?"—she clenches her teeth and tries to pull her dignity back together—"H-how dare you?! Have you been—spying—?"
A muscle in his cheek twitches, and his eyes go wide. He quickly snaps back to a flat affect, but the damage is done.
"No."
Yes.
Hiyori pushes herself up off the ground to tower over him.
"Well, as you can see, Yato, I'm perfectly all right without your help."
She fidgets some more with her sleeves.
"So…you can leave now."
He snorts, sitting up straighter and glaring at her. Dismissively, he says:
"I figured you'd just accuse me of spying on you anyway, so it's better worth my time to keep an eye on you from here. You're a hazard to yourself and others."
Her nostrils flare. Yato still sits cross-legged on the floor, playing with a loose thread at the hem of his yukata. He looks down at his fingers, so all she can see is the top of his dark head.
And Hiyori, after being preoccupied with his sudden appearance in her home, is hit with a realization: he is here, again. This time in her house.
There is a god in her house. Her knees become a bit shivery.
"I take it you don't know who he really is," Yato says at last.
His voice is low. The room suddenly feels much bigger and colder. She watches his finger keep winding around the loose thread.
"Who?" she asks, even though she already knows.
Yato clears his throat, and his finger stops twirling.
"That…that thing that ran away from me. The one called Nobu."
The air barely passes her lips when she asks: "You—know him?"
"Yes."
He stands up. She blinks, surprised at how quickly he moves. There seems to be so little of him—
Or, that's not it. He walks whatever faint borderline is between the world he comes from, and the one to which she belongs. And that's why he seems to only halfway exist.
"You can say you're fine on your own as often as you like," he says, looking down at her, reminding Hiyori that he has several inches on her. She swallows.
"That won't change the fact that he will come back."
His words don't register with her at first. Then, a cascade of ice hits the bottom of her stomach.
Her grandmother still hasn't come back.
"She's fine—your grandmother."
Hiyori looks up at him again, in shock. He's scratching the back of his neck. He looks—for lack of a better word—uncomfortable.
"He won't come back while I'm here. Not for a while, at least."
Hiyori keeps staring up at him. Then, her mouth flattens into a hard line.
"Explain."
He stops scratching his neck, and his eyebrows ascend toward his hairline.
"Explain what?"
"Everything."
She breathes in, deeply, then exhales a measured stream of air. Fixing her gaze on his, she demands:
"Explain everything to me, slowly. Without leaving out any details."
His eyes shift away from hers.
"I don't think you want that."
"I don't think it's really up to you what I want."
His fists are clenching and unclenching at his sides, but all his movements freeze when she takes a step closer to him.
"At least tell me about him," she pleads.
She takes another breath, keeping a tight lid on all the vile things that bubble up with the name:
"…Nobu. You can't tell me I don't deserve to know who he is," she says, verging on desperation.
The noise of insects and wind fills the brief silence.
"I would tell you, if I could," he finally says. "But even I don't know, exactly. I just…have to find him."
Yato's words from their last meeting resound in Hiyori's mind: "I'm looking for something around here. But I don't think I'll find it."
Hiyori realizes with a stab of clarity: he's been after Nobu this whole time. New Year's—that voice in her room—she hadn't imagined it. Every time Nobu had gotten close to her, Yato had also been there, half a footstep in his wake.
As she silently makes sense of this discovery, Yato breathes a short sigh—like he's relieved she's at last going to leave him alone and stop asking questions. His eyes track a sharp path around the room. They stop, right next to her futon.
"What's that?" he asks, the bright curiosity in his tone a jarring disruption from its earlier seriousness.
"Huh?" Hiyori follows the line of his gaze. Oh.
Oh no.
"It's nothing!" she yells right in his face, moving sideways to shield his view with her body. "Stop snooping!"
Yato stares at her in blank shock.
"If it's nothing, then why are you so red?"
"I'm not!"
He sets a hand on her arm and effortlessly moves her aside. He begins walking toward the little object that sits next to the head of the futon.
"You are one of the strangest humans I've ever met," he says, sounding faintly amused. He crouches down to pick it up. "What is this, anyway?"
Hiyori is torn between the half of her that wants to cover her eyes and run, and the half that is about to drag Yato out of her house by the scruff of his neck. As a result, she ends up just standing motionless, frozen in distress.
Yato straightens again, turning toward her and looking in confusion at what is in his hands. It's a small, roughly carved wooden house—small enough to rest in his palm. He holds it up in front of his eyes, turning it back and forth to catch the quickly fading light on the writing carved on its front. Hiyori hears his noise of surprise.
"My name's on this."
Hiyori feels herself nod. "Yes," she hears herself croak.
"Why?"
"Because," she gulps—she's going to hurl—right here, in front of him. How is this somehow just as unnerving as when Nobu had her in his clutches?
"Because, uh—it's…it's yours. It's kind of a…shrine."
She ends up whispering it. During the next few seconds, Hiyori can't look at him. Her knees are clattering. If she ends up falling down again, she'll beg him to just mercy kill her.
"A what?" Yato asks, barely audible.
"A shrine," she repeats miserably.
It's just a little thing. There is no reason for her to be so silly about it. This is what she thinks, so she can force herself to look at him again. But when she does—
"Hiyori."
He says it roughly, like her name is scraping at the inside of his throat. Looking at him, Hiyori feels as though some force has knocked her backward.
Yato is staring down at the little shrine in his hands, tight-lipped. Against the crude wooden corners, his thumbs shake so much that it looks like he might drop it. Then, he sets it down, gingerly, on the floor—quickly withdrawing his hands like the thing is burning him.
"I have to go."
And he does. Quickly, he lifts himself through the window, slipping into the liquid darkness—before she can call him back, or apologize for whatever it is she did wrong.
Her face is hot, and horribly red. She resists the juvenile urge to kick the little shrine to the other end of the room.
Then, she is suddenly tired—so tired she can hardly stand.
The realization that Nobu is following her, stalking her—making it his mission to terrorize and incapacitate her—makes her more weary than it does fearful.
Because, on some level, Hiyori always knew he wasn't done with her.
/
She wakes up in the middle of the night with a start.
"Yato?"
He isn't there. Of course he isn't there. It's someone else—not Yato, or Nobu.
A square of liquid moonlight shimmers like steel on the floor. The whole room smells of moisture—it's chilly. The air is heavy.
Hiyori sits up, and her limbs are slow. Even though her heart is racing, she can't seem to breathe properly. It feels like she's dreaming, or underwater.
"You really aren't anything special," a girl's voice says.
And then she is there, a bare breath away from Hiyori's nose. Her doll's face, as flawless as the surface of a pearl, is even more eerie against the blank coldness of her eyes.
The girl reaches out with a perfect hand to stroke the side of Hiyori's neck. The sleeve of her white yukata slips past her wrist. There are marks. Dozens of them, carved on just a few visible centimeters of flesh.
Hiyori draws a slow, shaky breath as the strange girl lets her finger pause over the staccato thread of her pulse. Her full upper lip quirks up in a sneer.
"So weak. I wonder…"
Hiyori yelps, and the girl brings her hand quickly away from her neck, a bead of crimson quivering at the end of her thumb. She lifts it up, studying it.
Then, she flicks her hand, and the drop flies onto Hiyori's cheek. Hiyori flinches, quickly wiping it off. Then, she holds her own hand up to her neck to press the shallow, pulsing wound left there.
"What do you want?" Hiyori whispers.
"I want to know why he likes you so much," the strange girl answers. "I want to know what you're doing to him."
Hiyori's eyes dart across the girl's face, seeking.
"Who—"
"He can't really protect you," the girl interrupts. "He's not the kind of god who protects."
She smiles, chillingly.
"Only spares."
Hiyori smells the pungent copper of her own blood on the air.
"Then again," the girl continues, "Yaboku has been acting differently now, for a little while."
"Yaboku…?" breathes Hiyori.
The girl giggles, and the sound of it is like a splash of blood in cold milk.
"I suppose you would know him by that other name he gave you. That is not his real name, you know."
Her crystal voice is warped with condescension.
Hiyori at last finds her own, from where it's buried somewhere under the waterweight of this girl's presence.
"What do you want?" she repeats, much more strongly. Suddenly, the recovered name bursts on her memory:
"Hiiro."
The girl gives her a toxic look. Hiyori feels that she has gained some control of the situation.
It doesn't last for long.
"Yato is just the name she gave him," Hiiro whispers, quickly recovering her smile. "That other girl. You look quite similar to her, did you know that?"
Hiyori's insides turn—cold snakes, squirming in her stomach. She doesn't want to ask. She doesn't want to know.
"How did you steal her face?"
It means nothing, she says to herself, pushing the tang of panic to the back of her throat.
"How did I get so lucky?"
It means nothing.
"What 'other girl'?" she asks. Her question is small, and falls flat.
Hiiro laughs again—not her high, cold giggle—but a ringing laugh of victory. And with it, she disappears. All she leaves behind is an echo.
Why, the girl he loved, of course.
Sakura.
