“I trusted you had more sense than that,” Akane added.
“We lost you for a while there,” Tojin said. “Did you go to the carnival specifically to lose us?”
“Tojin…” Akane said, squinting in the dim light. “Tojin, look at her. She’s terrified. Yumi, did you see another one?”
Yumi could only nod.
Tojin sighed. “This is why we said to not go out again. This is a duty for a painter.”
Painter.
The bell.
Yumi knew, even after one experience with the nightmare, that Akane and Tojin alone wouldn’t be enough to defeat it. They needed every painter in the region—hundreds, if she could find them.
And Painter, her Painter, was in danger.
“Bring your ink!” she said, then tore out of Tojin’s grip and went scrambling back down the alleyway. She didn’t see his bemused expression, nor the roll of Akane’s eyes. Because of course they didn’t recognize the danger. They’d done this hundreds of times. A nightmare, to them, was nothing terrifying.
Yumi reached the mouth of the alley and looked out at the torn-up playground—ghostly in the hion light. Still and empty. Several lights turned on around nearby buildings, then quickly shut off. This was painter business. Thank you for your service.
Suddenly apprehensive, Yumi crossed the playground onto the sports court, where her bag had fallen. She searched in it and found it sliced apart by claws, the bell broken and covered in ink. As she was struggling to comprehend this, something dark emerged from within a piece of fallen playground equipment. It grew to eleven feet tall, stalking up to her from behind.
Painter had eluded it. But this thing was smart. Dangerously crafty. Beyond that, there was a deeper problem. An issue Yumi and Painter couldn’t have anticipated. This thing could feel Yumi’s presence.
It knew where she was. Always.
This was why it hadn’t rampaged. Yumi didn’t know it yet, but this was what the creature had been doing all those weeks. It had been drawn to her. Had been watching her. Waiting for a chance to attack.
She felt it before she heard it. She spun and—too frightened even to scream—gasped as it rammed a clawed paw into her chest. The claws pierced her straight through, though they fuzzed right before they struck.
It would have killed almost any person, but Yumi had something this beast wanted. Power, Investiture, soul. Where it had needed to lap at others, here it could guzzle. Instead of spearing her physically, it let its blade-claws become incorporeal as they touched her—and this allowed it to draw out her essence.
Yumi felt an icy cold expanding from her core, as if her heart had been frozen—like the ice in drinks Design served—and was pumping frost through her body. Her gasp wilted, and she slumped to the ground, breathing out a cold mist.
She felt herself dying. Going to a place where there was no warmth, and could never be warmth. And…
And…
And she would not go without a fight.
Her emotions—the primal nerves that had been sending her into a panic all night—backed up against the wall of death. And from within her welled, like the fierce anger of a geyser, a refusal to be taken like this.
With a trembling hand—shaking like that of a woman a hundred years her senior—she reached to the side. She picked up a chunk of concrete torn up by the beast’s passing.
Then she stacked it on top of the one beside it.
The beast hesitated. The flow of power out of her slowed.
Yumi somehow found another chunk, though she was fading now, her burst of strength giving out. It is not a light thing to have a piece of your soul forcibly consumed—trust me.
With numb fingers, she placed the stone.
The monster didn’t appear frightened, but it leaned forward, no longer feeding. It stared at the stones with bone-white pits for eyes. Something in it seemed to…remember.
A second later a scream made it spin. Tojin had finally ambled out of the alleyway and—horrified by the sight of a fully stable nightmare—he fell backward to the ground. Akane screamed from behind him. Yes, they’d seen nightmares before, but never anything like this. It had an air about it, a debilitating sense of primeval danger.
The nightmare ripped away from Yumi, leaving her slumped against the ground, trembling. Her vision began to darken at the edges, her body going frigid as if she’d been left for a day in a blizzard.
She could only watch as the thing reached Tojin and Akane. These two it could kill. These two weren’t even worth a bite. These it would rend, destroy. It raised a claw to strike Tojin, who lay terrified on the ground.
Then Painter arrived.
Her Painter. He stepped over Tojin’s supine form, having rounded the street behind, looking for Yumi. He placed himself directly between the thing and Tojin and thrust his hand to the side, where a large paintbrush burst from his essence and formed as if out of silver light. He wouldn’t remember creating it, and after the fact wouldn’t have been able to tell you how he’d done it.
Akane had dropped her bag, breaking the ink jar, in her haste to get away. She’d tripped and fallen in the alley, and now—remembering Tojin—was trying to crawl to him in a panic. Neither of them could see Painter.
But Yumi could. Her angle was just right to look past the monster, looming on hind legs. To see the terrified Painter clutching his brush, confronting the thing. To see his shape itself begin to warp and fuzz, as it had before, crumbling like a statue whose outer layers were being scraped off by a terrible wind.
That Painter. Shaking. Breaking. Overwhelmed.
That Painter rammed his brush down into the ink spilled from Akane’s bag and began to paint.
A long line on the concrete. Knob on both ends. A sprig of bamboo. The shape of the nightmare twisted for a second, then—eyes going wider, deeper, whiter—it surged forward at him, driving him to take a step backward.
Painter, now inches from the thing, went pale. His figure crumbling. Eyes wide. But then Tojin whimpered from below, and something steeled in Painter. He rammed his brush back down, and—with a look of consummate determination—swept it out in front of him at the monster’s feet. And began to paint.
No, not just paint.
Create.
Sweeping arcs around him and Tojin, staining the ground with phantom ink. He met the monster’s gaze, not even looking down as he drew with his brush.
The nightmare stepped back. And Painter advanced. One step after another, driving the thing back with each twist of his brush, creating an artistic masterpiece that burned away behind him as he walked. The ink wasn’t real, Yumi thought. The brush should have vanished too, shouldn’t it?
But no. At that moment, Yumi understood. The brush was an extension of Painter. It belonged to him. As natural as his own heart. Lying there—watching him drive the thing back by force of skill, art, and sheer will—Yumi realized something. She’d been right at the start of all this.
The spirits had sent her a hero.
The nightmare began to shrink, twisting in a horrific way, enormous claws shortening, skeleton seeming to pop as it constricted. Its face narrowed as it was forced to conform to Painter’s vision of it, the one he painted on the concrete. Not a monster at all. Something friendly, with four paws and a wagging tail. The thing recognized this vision for it and let out a howl—fully stable enough to actually speak—then turned and loped away, its terrible form restoring as it broke from Painter’s spell.