“Hmm,” Hina said after a moment. “Like Okiku? The girl in the well? Is that why you were looking in there?”
“Something like that,” Lee said.Say yes, he thought.Tell me I’m not the only one. Say it out loud and make it real.
“The house is... loud,” Hina said at last. “It has a heartbeat.”
Lee nodded quickly. “It breathes,” he said, thinking of the air blowing through the open doors.
Hina watched him, still standing a careful distance away. “It has a pulse,” she said. “I heard that a river was diverted deep under this land. A narrow stream that leads to the sea. Maybe what you feel is the ocean’s heartbeat.”
But the ocean doesn’t have a face, Lee wanted to say.The ocean doesn’t have eyes.
“What do you know about the people who lived in this house before us?” Lee said.
Hina stilled. The trees shivered above her, the shadows of leaves covering the left half of her face. “Nothing,” she said, the word so soft, so frail, so completely unlike Hina that Lee wondered if it was a lie.
Lee Turner knew when people lied. Except for Hina.
Either she had never told him a lie, or she was the only person who could fool him. Lee hoped it was the former.
“But you said it was a samurai house,” Lee said. “How did you know that?”
“Because of the low ceilings,” Hina said. “The layout, thelocation. The house told me the story. All I know is what the walls are willing to say.”
Lee shifted from foot to foot. “Could women be samurai?” he said.
He didn’t realize how desperate he’d sounded until Hina leaned back. It was almost imperceptible, because Hina never flinched or took a step back from him, but her face had darkened as his shadow shifted over her. Lee swallowed and carefully stood up straight, taking a measured step away from Hina.
“Lee,” she said, “I love ghost stories as much as you, but they’re just stories. You’re safe here. You know that, right?”
“Of course,” he said quickly. “I’m not a kid anymore,” he added with a soft smile.
“Really? So you mean you’re not scared?” she teased.
“No,” Lee said honestly.
Lee Turner was scared of being caught for killing James. He was scared of jail. He was scared of himself and what he might do. But he was not scared of this house.
He sensed, even then, that the house had been built at the edge of a cliff overlooking an abyss of darkness, that it teetered somewhere between a beautiful lie and raw truth. And Lee wanted to fall all the way down.
“You should go home,” Lee said, half joking. Because Hina did not live here yet; it was his father’s house, and Hina didn’t have to fall down too. “Unless youwantto sleep in a haunted house.”
Hina smiled, tilting her head to the side. Her hair fell over one eye, shadows spilling across her face. “Don’t be silly, Lee,” she said. “No one leaves this house.”
Chapter Five
Sen
Sen woke before dawn.
There was something sacred about the smell of the damp earth under the moonlight, the first whispers of light threatening to pierce through the black sky. Samurai could only ever wake to darkness.
She changed her robes, brushed her hair, then sat beneath the quickly paling stars with a roll of paper, a brush, and an ink palette. Her father considered painting an acceptable form of meditation, so every morning, Sen translated her dreams into brushstrokes, ripping them from her mind and splattering them across clean paper with harsh lines. Maybe if she drew the images from her dreams, they would live on paper and no longer torment her by nightfall.
Ever since she’d come to this house, her dreams had changed.
Most nights, she dreamed of a black sea that drowned her even though she had no body, no lungs, no mouth. It roared more loudly than any beast, its salt scraping across her soul, its darkness stealing all her light. But on some nights, the seas parted and a pale woman sat on the white sand. Her lips moved as if forming words, but Sen could never hear them over the ocean’s roar.A great sadness weighed down her features, but when Sen drew closer, the ocean stole her away.
Sen set her brush down once she’d rendered her dream in black ink, then closed her eyes and finished her meditation in stillness. She could sense the entire landscape around her, as if painted in strokes of gold behind her closed eyelids. The shivering of the trees in the wind, the footprints carved into the earth, the sound of morning air winding through the rocks and branches and flowers. She felt the wind inside her as she breathed, for she was as much a part of the earth as any tree, her roots running even deeper into the world’s heart.
