“You’re pretty good with that,” Nozome told him.
“I suppose. I have something like this myself, so I’m used to this kind of work.”
“You have one of these…?”
“That’s right. Although I’ve been using mine for several hundred years, so it’s gotten a little worn down. I think I’ll take this Shadow Embroidery Kit as a replacement. Consider it my payment for dispatching the Shadow Eater and stitching this fellow’s head back on. That’s fair, don’t you think?”
Nozome nodded. She didn’t like this, but the man wasn’t leaving her much choice.
“Hey… You’re an Inhuman, too, aren’t you? Are you a god or something?” she asked.
“Mm… Something like that.”
“Are you a friend of that kid I gave the embroidery kit to?”
“No, I only met him today. Sorry, but I think you’d better give up on inflicting despair on him… There, that should do it.”
Finishing the final stitch on Nieno’s head, the man cut and tied off the end of the thread.
“By the way, you called this fellow Nieno, yes? Is that what he’s calling himself now?”
“…So what if it is?”
“…Never mind.”
The man’s composure seemed to fail him for a moment. He narrowed his eyes and gazed at Nieno with a complicated expression on his face. Like he was looking at something distasteful but also felt sad about it. It seemed like a whole lot of other emotions were competing for attention within his heart, too.
“Well now, demon child. I’ve brought you your black book and the suitcase with the doors on it. I suggest you and your partner use it to leave this village right now. And this time, don’t come back… I mean it.”
The man said the last part under his breath before turning around. He picked up the unmoving shadow monster and carried it away. Once he was out of sight, Nozome took Nieno’s hat and put it back on his head.
“Hey, Nieno. About what that guy said at the end… I get the feeling he was saying that to you, not me.”
“What?”
With his head back on his shoulders, Nieno was acting more like his old self. He adjusted his hat and tried making sense of things.
“Was that god somebody you used to know?” Nozome asked him.
“Perhaps… I’m afraid I’m not sure.”
Nieno simply tilted his head—now attached to his body once more by black threads—in bewilderment.
✦ ✦ ✦
Lord Chikage took the shrunken, wilted Shadow Eater back to his bamboo grove. By then, the shadow of a nearby mountain had fallen across it, making everything look darker than it should have for that time of day.
“If we wait until night, the Shadow Eater will melt into the darkness and get away,” Lord Chikage said. “We have to deal with it before then.”
Kakeru walked with Lord Chikage out of the grove to the stony riverbank. There, the god laid the creature down. He took out the contents of Kakeru’s knapsack and stuffed them into the monster’s open stomach, stitching it up with black thread when he was done. By now the Shadow Eater was just a hazy, indistinct shape that still somewhat resembled a dog.
“Lord Chikage… This shadow’s never going to go back to being Kurosuke, is it?”
“It never was. A shadow is a shadow. Your old friend has been slumbering beneath the ground this whole time.”
Was that true? Or was it just the god’s way of comforting the boy for changing Kurosuke into a monster? Kakeru had no way of knowing. But regardless, it didn’t change what needed to be done. Now that this shadow had become a Shadow Eater, it had to be put down. Kakeru was sure of that.
Lord Chikage had stuffed the monster’s belly with fireworks. Kakeru had taken those from his grandma’s store when he first went on the run. There had been plenty in the storeroom. He took the matches he’d gotten from the family altar and lit the last one. When it began to spark, he stuffed it through a gap in the threads. He closed his eyes and jumped back.
The fireworks inside the Shadow Eater caught fire one after another. They erupted into showers of sparks and bursts of color, ripping apart their shadowy container. They burned, banged, and crackled until every last scrap of shadow had disappeared completely.