The Capital lay silent like a held breath. Not a kitten was to be found on the Capital streets past dusk. Spirits burrowed into their dens. Humans shuttered their shops and locked their barrier gates. Even the drunks had bedded down for the night.

Kuro shivered and pulled his yukata closer around him as he paced at the foot of the Imperial Palace walls. The cotton did nothing to warm him.

“Ren, you’d have better worn a surcoat.” Humans died from the cold.

But if Ren were clever enough to remember a surcoat, he would have been clever enough to not run into the streets in the first place.

The road was too dark, the shadows too dense. They bristled and pooled like demons in the making, ready to eat stupid little humans and the foolish fox who followed them. Kuro shook his head even as his heart sped.

The shadows weren’t a danger. The real danger slivered through the streets, slipping through holes in the system of gates, before it rose up to strike. Humans and spirits covered their ears as they waited to find the severed limbs in the morning.

Kuro needed to find Ren, fast. He swivelled his ears, but the very hush and faint hum of the wards colluded against him. He didn’t even hear the patter of cat paws until the Cat Girl jumped down in front of him. “Oh ho ho.”

Kuro only stared, wishing desperately he could squeeze his eyes shut.

Damn, damn, damn. He should have changed back. The Cat Girl had seen his ears and would sell him out.

“Look who’s scampering out so late,” the Cat Girl said. “Usually you’re tucked into a den with your tail between your legs.”

If he’d been any less tense, his jaw would have dropped. Was she playing with him?

The Cat Girl waited for a response, acting as if she didn’t have the same slitted eyes as Kuro, ones that saw through the blackness.

“Why—” His voice cracked. He coughed. “Why would I come out at night when I’d only find you?”

“Rats.” She grinned wide, revealing pointed fangs.

He wrinkled his nose.

“Don’t pretend you’re too good to eat rats.”

Would she sell him out this moment or the next? “How can you bear the fur and skeleton with a human stomach?”

“Idiot,” she chimed. “I only look like this.”

Humans saw a lucky calico cat rather than the annoyance she really was. “So go catch a rat.”

She slid around him, purring. “My, my, what beautiful cloth.”

“It’s cotton.” No more dawdling, he reminded himself. He had to leave, quick. “Excuse me. I don’t have anything important to do, but anything is better than talking to you.”

“Like rescuing that human you’ve adopted?”

Kuro tensed. “You saw him?”

She smiled at him.

“Where?”

“Getting himself in trouble by the river.”

The river. Of course.

“Wait.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why would you tell me?”

“Why indeed?” The Cat Girl wandered across the alley and jumped onto the shop roof. “You’d better hurry. I can smell him all the way across the city, and he smells delicious.”

Kuro clenched his teeth. She had to be leading him into a trap. But she trotted across the roofs in the opposite direction.

The gates made a ten minute walk through the artisan’s district into a hour-long maze. Kuro dashed to half-remembered gaps between poles and crawled through fence holes to avoid the barrier gates. When all else failed, crawling over fences to drop in the next yard. Ren, being human, would have simply climbed over the gates. Stupid, useless barriers.

Kuro jumped from the last fence and paused on the bank. Under the light of the moon, the river sparkled with the same purification power as the onmyouji’s barriers. The Undesirables shuttered themselves in their shacks with any stray dogs they could lure inside, their only protection since the other humans didn’t allow them to cross into shrines to obtain charms.

He jogged along the bank. There. Ren was the only human outside, the sacred glow from the river silvering his ponytail. The idiot really had forgotten a surcoat.

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A geisha leaned away from him as she toyed with her silk kimono skirt, embroidered with flower petals despite the Shogun’s ban on such luxuries. A white Noh mask hid her face.

Ren gestured, his head bobbing, as if he actually spoke to her.

Wind buffeted the bank, obscuring the words before they reached Kuro’s sensitive fox ears. Ren’s pony-tail and yukata sleeves flew with the wind, but the geisha’s sleeves remained undisturbed like the surface of a pond on a still, summer day.

A ghost. Not even Ren could be so naive as to mistake the signs. A geisha with a forbidden kimono in the poorest district, untouched by the wind. She might as well have painted ‘ghost’ in human scribbles across her mask.

Yet he talked to her. Kuro narrowed his eyes and twitched his ears, but the wind kept any words from him. Unless Ren had lied to him about being unmoved by a pretty girl. Beauty was a ghost’s greatest weapon, and she had reeled him in like any other idiot male. But why would Ren lie about that?

Kuro slid down the bank. Neither Ren nor the ghost glanced in his direction. He tiptoed between two shacks.

Yumi had told him, her eyes flashing with loathing, that Ren colluded with the Night Parade. Perhaps she hadn’t been so delusional as he’d thought. Not even Ren could be so naive as to really care about the Undesirables. But if he needed the chance to sneak out to speak with emissaries from the Night Parade… And Kuro to guard him from any unwanted attention.

Kuro slipped against the wall of the shack, peeking around the corner. He was close enough to grab Ren’s shoulder, but still hidden in the shadows.

Ren bowed his head. “Well, thanks anyway.”

The ghost tipped her head to the side. Kuro tensed, and caught the shimmer of steel in the moonlight. Ren stared directly into her Noh mask, ignorant of the blade peeking out of her kimono sleeve.

“Tell me,” the ghost said. “Do you think I’m beautiful?”

Ren drew in a breath. Idiot! Kuro snatched his shoulder and yanked him back into the shadows. Ren drew the Kusanagi, and another flash of metal streaked toward him.

Kuro ducked. “Stop, it’s me, it’s me!”

The sword stopped, hovering just an inch next to Kuro’s temple. “Kuro? You shouldn’t jump out in the dark like that!”

That was the king of all obvious statements. But Kuro didn’t have time to berate Ren about it at that moment. There was still the ghost with her blade to deal with.

Kuro whirled on the ghost. “What a shameless question.”

She ducked back, as if startled. Noh masks never included eye holes, but ghosts didn’t need them. She must have seen his ears. The things he did for Ren!

“A Grannie like you shouldn’t be asking questions like that.”

The ghost choked in outrage. Her hands came up, including the knife.

Ren inhaled, moving to come around Kuro’s side. Kuro blocked him with an arm.

“I am not a Grannie.” The ghost ripped off her mask. “And I do not look old!”

She didn’t, not in the way humans saw things. Her skin was as smooth as Ren’s.

But that wasn’t why she wore the mask.

Ren screamed.

A bloody gash ripped her face from ear to ear. Her lips parted, and the bloody edges separated into a macabre grin. White teeth and bone gleamed amid crimson.

Kuro grabbed Ren by the waist and threw him over his shoulder before darting between two shacks. Ren was too heavy to haul up the slope, so Kuro ran as quickly as he down the riverbank.

“Stop,” Ren told him. “Let me down.”

“Forget it!” Kuro gritted his teeth. He didn’t slow until until the row houses ended and the Dragon God’s torii gates loomed over them. Then he dropped Ren like a sack of rice.

“Idiot!” Kuro loomed over him. “You can’t slice a ghost.”

Ren picked himself up, staring behind him. The ghost couldn’t follow them so far, not even if Kuro had repeatedly stopped to yell “Grannie” to her.

In the city, rumbles and crackles split the hush.

“What was that?” Ren peered around him.

“Who knows,” he lied. A good thing Ren only had human ears, and couldn’t hear the human screams getting cut off.

Ren returned to stare at Kuro, but no less tense. “What happened to her? The ghost, I mean.”

“She died.” Had no one thought to explain to him what a ghost was?

Ren shot him a narrowed eye look. “I meant, what happened to her before she died?”

“Who knows.” Kuro shrugged. “And no, don’t run back to ask her. I hauled your ass here once. I’m not doing it again. There’s no point. The ghost’s mind doesn’t survive. All she thinks about is slicing your face in half. And no, I don’t know how to stitch your face back together, so don’t run back.”

“How do you know?”

“That I can’t stitch? Because I’ve never done it!”

“That she’d slice my face?”

“Someone sliced hers. That’s what ghosts do.”

Ren nodded. He sheathed his sword.

Kuro heaved a sigh of relief.

“Although it might have been prudent for you not to call her an old woman,” Ren said. “That seemed to tick her off.”

“You don’t say.” He crossed his arms. “Never directly answer a ghost’s question. If you had said yes, she would have sliced your face. If you had said no, she would have done the same thing.”

He nodded. “Good to know.”

“And don’t talk to them!” He stomped his feet. “Never talk to them.”

“I was asking her—”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure you had no idea that she was a ghost, despite being a wealthy-looking geisha in the middle of the poorest district in the Capital.”

“I knew she was a ghost,” Ren said.

Kuro flicked him an irritated look. Don’t prove Yumi right. Anything but that.

“If a demon’s been taking humans, then a ghost would know something, right?”

He grunted. “A ghost can barely see anything past her own death.”

“And I knew you’d protect me.” Ren tried to smother his grin, but it burst forth like an arrogant weed.

“You expected me to not only care enough to protect you, but to find you in the whole Capital?”

“I left you a note.”

Kuro drew the note out of his collar, and slapped it against Ren’s chest. “You mean this wasted paper of human scribbles?”

“Yes.” Ren caught the paper before it fell.

Kuro jerked his hands out in front of him. “I can’t read human scribbles.”

Ren paused in the middle of sliding the paper into his collar. “You can’t?”

The way Ren said those words, like he couldn’t conceive that anyone couldn’t read. His mother had probably taught him, shedding her coldness like a surcoat. Leaning over him as he knelt at his desk and gently correcting him.

Kuro had been too young to read when he’d lived at the shrine. Fox eyes weren’t made for deciphering squiggles, or so the other foxes had protested way too often to be the entire truth. Then his fur had blackened, and his mother had taken him on a trip down to the river before he had even learned to adopt human form.

But maybe it hadn’t been the black fur. Maybe she’d decided Kuro would always be too stupid to learn, a disgrace that Reiha could never abide— “Why would I?” Kuro snapped and stomped up the slope before Ren could glimpse his face in the moonlight.

Ren followed, his footsteps barely brushing the dying grass. At the top, Ren took Kuro’s hand and pulled him to a stop.

“What now?” Kuro demanded. “Going to mock me about not writing poetry as well?”

Ren grinned. “Not at all. I’m going to teach you how to read.”