Frail Human Heart Read online

  CONTENTS

  PREVIOUSLY IN THE NAME OF THE BLADE TRILOGY…

  CHAPTER 1: BROKEN

  CHAPTER 2: WHAT DREAMS MAY COME

  CHAPTER 3: INCY WINCY

  CHAPTER 4: CONTROL FREAKING OUT

  CHAPTER 5: RETURN TO AVALON

  CHAPTER 6: THE TIES THAT BIND

  CHAPTER 7: ONWARDS AND DOWNWARDS

  CHAPTER 8: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

  CHAPTER 9: SOMEBODY FORGOT TO BRING TOTO

  CHAPTER 10: SEAFOOD SURPRISE

  CHAPTER 11: FLESH WOUNDS

  CHAPTER 12: CRACKS

  CHAPTER 13: THE LAST RESORT

  CHAPTER 14: HOMECOMING

  CHAPTER 15: INTO THE PAST

  CHAPTER 16: OUT OF THE PAST

  CHAPTER 17: SILVER FANGS

  CHAPTER 18: THE RED THREAD

  CHAPTER 19: REUNION

  CHAPTER 20: “OOPS” IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT

  CHAPTER 21: DAUGHTER OF THE KITSUNE

  CHAPTER 22: TICK TOCK

  CHAPTER 23: BEFORE THE STORM

  CHAPTER 24: SHADOWS AND BLOOD

  CHAPTER 25: FRAIL HUMAN HEART

  EPILOGUE: BITTERSWEET SIXTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Books by the same author

  This book – and this trilogy – is dedicated to

  David Marriott, whose love of shenanigans,

  badass heroines and unrepentant sarcasm

  shaped not only his daughter’s writing,

  but also his daughter, far more than he ever realized.

  PREVIOUSLY IN THE NAME OF THE BLADE TRILOGY…

  In search of the perfect costume for a fancy-dress party, Mio Yamato steals a priceless antique katana from her family’s attic. Big mistake. The Nekomata – a cat-demon from Japanese myth – awakens and attempts to take the sword by force. Only the arrival of a mysterious warrior boy saves Mio and her best friend, Jack, from the monster’s claws. Their saviour, Shinobu, has been trapped in the katana for the past five hundred years.

  Foiled, the Nekomata kidnaps Jack’s sister, Rachel. Shinobu calls for help from the Kitsune, immortal spirit foxes, who agree to fight by Mio’s side. During a desperate battle with the beast, Shinobu sacrifices himself to save Rachel, and Mio bonds with the sword in order to destroy the Nekomata. Once it is dead, Shinobu’s wounds heal. Mio is overjoyed.

  But soon the Nekomata’s dark mistress – Izanami, Goddess of Death – sends an even worse threat into the mortal realm: the Shikome, monstrous winged women whose feathers spread a supernatural plague. With Jack infected and Rachel dangerously mutating as a result of the Nekomata’s bite, Shinobu and Mio seek out answers from a sinister old man, Mr Leech, who tells them that the only way to end the plague and save Rachel is to imprison Shinobu within the blade once more. Mio also learns that her own father has known of the existence of monsters – and the sword’s dangerous powers – all along, when he saves her and Shinobu from a swarm of the winged creatures.

  As Shikome swarm on the hospital where Jack is being treated and Mio’s father succombs to the plague, Mio has no choice but to sacrifice Shinobu to the blade. Jack, Rachel, and Mio’s father are saved, along with all the plague’s victims, and the Shikome are banished. But Mio is left emotionally devastated by Shinobu’s death and determined to make the gods pay for what they have done…

  CHAPTER 1

  BROKEN

  I couldn’t see her.

  The pearly white flames sheathing the katana illuminated dark streaks of fungus on the concrete walls of the storm drain, the fleeting red gleam of a rat’s eyes further down the tunnel and the murky black water swirling and splashing at my toes. It also lit up a few things floating in the water that I didn’t want to look at closely. But it didn’t show me the one thing I had wanted and expected to see.

  Rachel.

  “Everything OK down there?” my dad shouted into the manhole over my head.

  “I’m fine – hang on!” I yelled back.

  I walked along the narrow edge of brick that ran down one side of the tunnel, trying to avoid the splashing water as I moved deeper into the darkness. I lifted the flickering light of the sword higher, squinting against the dark.

  “You’re very quiet,” I whispered to the blade. “Nothing to say?”

  The sword’s energy jumped against my palm like an uneasy heartbeat, but the familiar, metallic voice remained silent.

  I still felt the compulsion – a magnetic, physical attraction to the blade – twinned with a deep-down sense of responsibility to protect him, keep him safe. That was apparently hardwired into everyone in my family. It sat alongside my own rational awareness that allowing the sword’s destructive power to fall into the wrong hands would be disastrous for the whole world. But the influence that the katana had exerted on my emotions, the silvery, persuasive whispering that had put such pressure on my mind that I sometimes thought I was going mad? It was gone. For the first time in what felt like forever, I was really and truly alone in my head.

  I hated it.

  “Rachel!” I called out. My voice bounced around the drain eerily. “It’s me! You can come out!”

  There were tiny skittering noises in the shadows as vermin fled from the noise and light, but nothing else. I strained my ears for any giveaway sounds: a splash, a footstep on the bricks, even a weak cry for help. This was where I’d sensed her, almost seen her, during my vision. I knew I hadn’t been mistaken. She’d been in this drain.

  But not any more. I was too late, again.

  “Shit.”

  Exhaustion pulled my shoulders down into a weary slump. With a sigh, I turned and went back the way I’d come. The dim blue disc of the open manhole appeared overhead. There was a circle of heads silhouetted against the dusky night sky. My father. Hikaru, our friendly neighbourhood fox spirit. And Jack, my best friend – Rachel’s younger sister. They were all peering down anxiously at me.

  “Well?” Jack asked. The word echoed around me, multiplying the single question into a hundred. I didn’t have any answers.

  “Make some room. I’m coming out,” I called.

  As they backed out of sight I reached over my shoulder and eased the katana into his saya – the lacquered wooden sheath – which rested against my back in its leather harness. As the blade entered the embrace of the saya, the prismatic white fire of the sword was slowly extinguished, plunging the storm drain into impenetrable shadow.

  When the tsuba – the sword’s guard – clicked home against the mouth of the saya, I let go of the katana, flexing my fingers experimentally. Not very long ago the simple action of replacing the blade in his sheath would have taken almost impossible effort. It would have left me feeling shaken and bereft. The sword would have resisted all the way, beguiling me, tempting me, trying to convince me that I was only complete when I allowed him to wield me as if I was the weapon and he the fighter. I could hardly believe it was so easy now. It almost seemed like cheating – until I remembered the price I had paid for my free will.

  I clambered carelessly up the metal rungs set into the wall of the storm drain until I could catch the edge of the manhole with both hands, then swung myself up and out of the hole in a jerky, abrupt movement. Crouching on the pitted tarmac, I grabbed the manhole cover, which we had found already pulled away from the opening in the ground, and pushed it back into place with a heave and a twist.

  “She wasn’t down there, was she?” Jack said as I straightened up. “Do you think you were wrong about what you saw – dreamed – whatever?”

  “No.” The deep white claw marks gouged in the grubby cement of the walls proved that my mental image of poor Rachel’s desperate struggle down there, the way she had lashed out in her pain as she fought against the transformation, was real. But
I couldn’t exactly share that with Jack.

  “She must have got herself out and away before we arrived. She didn’t know we were coming to look for her.”

  “Why was she down there in the first place?” Jack asked, pacing away and then back again. “What was wrong with her? What happened while I was in that hospital?”

  “All right, there are a lot of questions to be answered, but the best thing we can do is head home…” my father began in his usual commanding tone.

  Jack was too worked up to listen. She spun back to face me. “Are we in, like, immediate danger from anything horrible right this minute?”

  I cast an apprehensive look at the royal-blue sky. It wasn’t full dark yet, but the harsh orange glow of the streetlights behind the hospital made the shadows seem more intense, and my instincts were urging me to head for sanctuary. My parents’ house, warded against supernatural attack by the London Kitsune, was the only truly safe place for us – the one safe place left in the city, probably. But we’d already seen, on multiple occasions, that darkness was no more dangerous than daylight. Plenty of creatures from the Underworld hunted equally well in either. And Izanami had just suffered a devastating defeat. She was surely going to need some time to recover from seeing her plans turn to dust.

  Reluctantly, I shook my head. The bones in my neck creaked. My dad made an exasperated face and folded his arms.

  “All right then, tell me what is going on with my sister,” Jack demanded. “I know it’s bad. She came to the hospital. She was talking with someone else’s voice – it said it was the Nekomata’s mistress – and her eyes were all black.”

  Well, shit. I rubbed my hand over my face wearily. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Rachel was supposed to be with you, Mio. You were supposed to be keeping each other safe.” The words were edged with an accusation that cut me more painfully than a knife in the gut.

  “I tried my best. I did, Jack. She wasn’t … herself. The bite – the Nekomata bite – changed her.”

  “Changed her? What? How? Did you know that could happen?”

  “Of course I didn’t. When we left the hospital, she told us that she felt wrong. Different. She couldn’t control her temper. Kept snapping for no reason. The tooth marks on her neck disappeared. She got fast and really strong. Stronger than me. Right after you called us she lost it. She attacked me and…” No. Can’t say his name yet. “Then she ran off.”

  At her sides, Jack’s hands trembled, then slowly curled into fists. “You let her go?”

  Sometimes the only thing you can do is let go…

  I flinched from the memory of his voice. “I couldn’t stop her.”

  “You let her go and you didn’t tell me. You didn’t call me. I can’t believe this. She’s my sister. I had the right to know she’s turning into some kind of monster!”

  “She isn’t turning into a monster,” I said flatly. I could see that my lack of emotion was riling Jack up even more, but I didn’t have anything else to offer her. I was so bloody tired. “That explosion of power that healed you and banished the Shikome? It fixed Rachel, too. She’s OK now.”

  At least, as OK as anyone could be when their soul had been invaded by darkness and they only just escaped before the point of no return.

  Relief and gratitude passed fleetingly over Jack’s face. Then the anger was back. She took a step into my space, poking my shoulder. “Then where is she? Why should I believe anything you say when you’ve been keeping all this shit a secret from me the whole time?”

  “Jack,” Hikaru, his face chalky and drawn with tiredness, interrupted firmly. “I can tell you’re upset but this isn’t—”

  “You stay out of it. You, too, Mr Yamato!” Jack snapped at my father as he opened his mouth. “This is between me and her. And you’d better not try to bullshit me, Mio, because I know you and I can see right through it. What the hell were you thinking?”

  For the first time I looked Jack dead in the eye. She blinked, then took a faltering step back, suddenly uncertain.

  “First I was thinking,” I said quietly, “that my best friend was in the hospital, dying, and her sister had just tried to carve my face off, and it was up to me to somehow figure out a way to save them both. A little while after that I was thinking about not getting swept off a rooftop or slashed to bits or dying of the taint when a bunch of Shikome ambushed me.”

  “Mio.”

  I ignored Dad’s interruption, eyes still fixed on Jack. “Then I was thinking about how apparently everything I believed about my family and my father was a lie, because it turned out he knew about the sword and the monsters all along. And finally—”

  “I didn’t mean—” Jack began.

  I rolled right over her without raising my voice, refusing to stop now that I’d started. “Finally, I was thinking about how in order to close the portal to Yomi, save London from the Foul Women, turn Rachel back into a human, heal you and stop my dad from dying at my feet, I needed to sacrifice … sacrifice … and watch him get sucked into an eternal prison of darkness. Again.”

  Hikaru, my father and Jack were all gaping at me now, wide-eyed and appalled. One of Jack’s hands crept up to cover her mouth as her eyes fixed on my shoulder. I knew what she was staring at: the black-silk-wrapped hilt of the sword poking out of the baggy neckline of my dad’s ruined old sweatshirt.

  Jack had known him better than either of the other two. She had been there when he first broke free of the sword, had listened when he described the endless dark horror of his centuries trapped in the blade. She looked stricken. Maybe I’d said too much.

  “So. That was what I was thinking,” I finished awkwardly.

  “Mimi, I…” Jack stuttered. “I’m sorry… I didn’t—”

  “Forget it.”

  “But Shin—”

  I flinched, cutting her off sharply. “Let’s go home and see if Rachel’s there.”

  Jack reached out. I avoided her as naturally as I could, and pretended not to see the hurt on her face or the warning look that my father gave her.

  You must survive. You are the sword-bearer. You are the key to this battle.

  I won’t forget, I promised him silently, fingers stealing back to caress the grip of the katana. I won’t forget. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.

  I will end this war.

  There was no sign of Rachel at the house. No sign she’d been there while we were gone, either.

  The familiar rooms suddenly seemed too large, the space echoing with the memory of voices that weren’t there, the shadows of people who should have been. I lingered in the doorway of the living room, my eyes trailing over the ordinary shapes of my home as if they were rare, exotic artefacts in a museum. Nothing seemed real.

  “She hasn’t called her own phone,” Jack said fretfully, putting Rachel’s mobile down on the coffee table. “Maybe she tried your house phone?”

  She moved past me, back into the hall. Hikaru trailed after her, looking awkward. I realized it was the first time he’d actually been inside the house – in fact, it might be the first time he’d been inside a human house, full stop. I should probably say something to make him feel welcome. I should reassure my dad, too; he was sitting on the arm of his favourite chair, staring at me expectantly. But I didn’t know what to say to either of them, or how to comfort Jack. It was like my little tantrum in the hospital car park had sucked out the last of my words and now I was empty. I felt distant from them all. I felt alone, even though they were right here with me.

  I felt broken.

  “Holy crap, there’s more than a dozen messages on here,” Jack said from the hallway. There was a loud beep as she hit the play button on the answering machine.

  My dad’s voice flooded the hall. “Mio, why aren’t you answering your mobile? I don’t know exactly what is going on over there, but I’ve got an idea, and I’m coming back. Stay inside. Stay out of trouble. Don’t do anything until I get there − do you hear me? Nothing.”

  My da
d rubbed his hand over his face, looking rueful at the echo of contained fury in his recorded voice. “I was … worried.”

  The phone beeped again. “Mio?” My mum’s voice now. “Pick up if you’re there, honey. No? Listen, Rachel called. Your father didn’t give me the chance to talk to her, but I know something’s happened. Are you all right? Please call me back as soon as you get this.”

  After the next beep I heard my mum’s voice again, this time snarling. “How dare you do this to me, Takashi? You had better have the best explanation of your damned life – no, I don’t even care about explanations. Call me back as soon as you get there and tell me what is going on or I am getting a divorce, you bastard.”

  The next message from Mum was quiet and steely. “Someone has to be there. Why haven’t you called me? Why hasn’t someone called me? Mio, Takashi, one of you pick up the phone. I need to know that you’re both OK.”

  I spoke over the next message. “You have to talk to her.”

  My father’s expression was artificially calm. “I know. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

  I restrained the urge to throw something at him and scream How the hell should I know? “You say you’re sorry. That we’re both safe. And tell her she can’t come home. No matter what. She can’t come home.” And that was it. I was done. I walked quickly towards the stairs and began the climb. “I’m – I’m going to my room. I need to rest. I need to think.”

  “Mimi!” Jack ran after me. “Are you…? Look, are you going to be OK? About what I said before—”

  Various responses cycled through my head. I settled on, “I’m fine. Just tired. Don’t worry about Rachel – I promise she’s OK. But if she hasn’t turned up by the morning, I’ll come up with a new plan.”

  I went on up the stairs, leaving everyone behind.

  I opened my bedroom door and stepped inside with relief. He had never been in here. I flicked on the bedside light and pulled off my leather sword harness with quick, efficient movements, removing the sheathed katana so I could check him over for wear, damage or dirt. Despite everything, the sword was still pristine. The one unchanging, perfect thing in my world.