“Fuck off.” I stomped a heel into his calf, a thumb’s length south of the back of his knee, snarling as I spun away. Phillip slung me a wounded-dog look, the candle-glow picking out the gold in his hair. In the next room, a perfect black silhouette on white rice paper, kanemizu on ivory, the ohaguro-bettari sat and laughed like someone’d told her the joke that killed God.
8
Don’t touch me,” said Faiz.
“Jesus. We’re all friends here, man.” Phillip held his palms up, guiltless as a madonna, features twitching through the permutations of a smile. He had lost the trick of the expression, somehow, somewhere between arrival and the time that Faiz wrenched out his own tooth, a strand of red nerve whipping through the half-gold light.
We could be dead.
You’d think it’d be harder. But if you’re desperate enough, you can shovel under the gum with your nails, digging out sickle-moons of bleeding pink flesh until the bicuspid loosens, pre-slickened with blood, and you can anchor a grip around the root and pull. At least we’d kept him from cutting out his heart. At least there was that. Faiz had fucked his own hand raw, trying to eke out a little bit of spunk to drip into the floorboards. But it could have been worse.
“If you were my friend, you’d let me die—”
He pushed and Phillip did not yield, a summer romance with the runway separating the two, Phillip’s post-collegiate musculature longer, leaner, still built to be loved by the light. Next to the other man, Faiz looked old, tired, middle-aged before his season. “Are you listening to yourself? Do you have any idea how melodramatic you sound?”
I sat down as the two continued to bicker, chest to calisthenics-honed chest, shoulders scissored back, like one of them was on the precipice of inviting the other to waltz. On the walls, the yokai danced like they invented the idea, pirouetting through genres and periods, Nara to Muromachi, every shogunate of literati painting, austere to aureate, twelve bodies to a cosmic tango.
“You okay?” Lin touched fingers to my shoulder.
I looked up into his narrow face, kabuki pale, shaped like some kumadori artist had taken a brush to his bones, all slant and sharpness. A fox’s countenance, too clever even behind Coke-bottle glasses. The ohaguro-bettari stood behind his shoulder, smiling, every tooth capped in ink, so close to his cheek that he had to feel her breath on his ear. A stench of vinegar and rust seeped everywhere, and I tried not to think about silk and white satin, so many yards of both, enough to bury a corpse six times over. “No. There is no fucking way I could be okay.”
“Tell me about it.” Lin smiled like he meant it. We both knew he didn’t. He lit a cigarette—hand-rolled, cut with tamarind peel and weed—and squatted beside me, smoke curling between his teeth. The ohaguro-bettari followed, kneeling beside him, beside us. Lin didn’t look at her once.
But I did. I stared at the yokai as I took a toke from Lin’s joint. She had the angles of someone carefully starved from cradle to nuptials, clavicle and collarbone in stark chiaroscuro. Her skin didn’t just look like porcelain, it was porcelain, enameled and gleaming, faultless save for her red mouth; no eyes, no nose, no philtrum, not even the conceit of cheekbones. But even her flesh wasn’t as pale as the shiromuku she wore, the satin the color of expensive chalk.
“We could just go, you know?”
“No.”
“The doors aren’t locked. The manor isn’t keeping us in here.”
“Is that so?”
“Cat.” He plucked the cigarette from my fingers, his voice gentle as he could make it, the same timbre as the one you’d extend to a suicide risk: slightly frightened, too much syncopation. Lin’s breath plumed white. It’d gotten cold again in the last few minutes. “He isn’t your responsibility.”
I exhaled on my fingertips, the nails already purpling at the base. “He’s my best friend.”
“And an absolute fucking idiot.” A bristling of rage—not anger, Lin never did anything halfway—like the pelt of a dog rubbed the wrong way, his smile vicious.
I nodded. There wasn’t much else to say so we sat for a long minute, passing the cigarette between us until it shriveled to an ember, Faiz and Phillip fighting the whole while. They’d diversified to character attacks, petty insults, all those years of friendship run through the abattoir, back and forth until every secret was turned inside out. Any second now, something was going to snap, a neck or a temper or a spine.
I looked over. The ohaguro-bettari was smiling like an ingénue at her first soiree, a blood-soaked husband on the horizon. He’d be the last man to stagger from the killing block, an axe in his hands, and that’s how you knew he was the one. Because he was a survivor, Mr. Take No Prisoner.