Keishin choked on mud. “Go.”
Hana clung to his wounded hand. His skin grew slick with blood, unraveling the cloth around it. “Hold on.”
Keishin looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said and let hergo.
A flurry of hands grabbed his head and pulled him into the ground, retreating into the soil after him.
“Kei!” Hana threw herself onto the spot Keishin had vanished from and clawed at the soil. “Kei!”
She slumped back, sobbing, her hands caked with mud. The stretch of sky above the hole grew blurry with her tears. She let her tears fall, roll off her cheeks, and water the ground. Her shovel disappeared into the mud. Hana gasped and sat up. Gnarled hands grabbed her waist. More hands burst from the earth around her. They locked their fingers onto Hana’s legs and arms and dragged her into the ground as she screamed.
Chapter Forty-eight
They Looked like Children
The soft giggling of children echoed around him. Keishin crawled blindly on his hands and knees, coughing out mud. He rubbed the dirt from his eyes and blinked. The most he could make out from the shadows was that he was in some kind of tunnel or cave. Dark figures came into focus as he pushed himself to his feet. “Where am I?” He squinted at the blurry shapes. “Who are you?”
The echo of his voice answered him back. Laughter followedit.
“What do you want with me?” Keishin said.
“Play with us,” a chorus of children’s voices replied. “We want to play.”
“Play?” Keishin’s sight cleared. A group of young children circled him, the light from their faintly glowing lanterns swallowed by their completely black, sunken eyes. Long wisps of thinning dark hair that barely covered their scalps clung to their ashen cheeks. Keishin staggered back.
The children raised their lanterns higher, illuminating their mud-covered, clawlike nails. “We want to play.”
A scream pierced the dark.
“Hana!” Keishin twisted around.
“Kei?” Hana’s voice rang through the tunnel.
Keishin rushed to follow her voice. The children dug intoKeishin’s arm with their nails and held him back, their icy fingers draining the warmth from his own. Keishin flinched. The only time he had ever touched a corpse was when he’d held his father’s hand to say goodbye. These children felt colder, stripped of the smallest residue of life. They tugged at his arm. “Play with us.”
“I…I will,” Keishin said, trying to ignore the chill seeping into his bones. “But I need to find my friend first. Both of us will play with you. We’ll have more fun.”
The children looked at one another and then back at Keishin. “We’ll have more fun,” they said, mimicking Keishin’s tone.
“We will. I promise. Just take me to Hana.”
“Hana! Hana!” The children laughed as they said her name in unison.
“Hana!” Other children giggled in the tunnel’s shadows. “Hana!”
A group of children emerged from the dark, dragging Hana between them.
Keishin wrestled free from the children, slicing his arm on their sharp nails, and nearly reopening his stitched wound. He ran to Hana. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
“I…I’m just a little dizzy.” She rubbed her forehead. “I hit my head when I fell.”
“Play with us,” the children said. “You promised.”
“We will,” Keishin said. “But Hana can’t play now. She needs to rest. And water. She needs water.”
“Water!” The children giggled. “We will play in the water. Come. You promised. Come.”
“No,” Keishin said. “Hana’s hurt. She—”
