Read Online The Devil's Backbone (A Niki Slobodian Novel: Book Five) by J.L. Murray - Free Book Online Page B

the fear, the tears, the loathing. To them, I was the one ending their lives, not the Yuki-onna.
    “Why do they hate you?” said Aki. “It’s not your fault.”
    “Human nature,” I said.  
    “They fear you.”
    “Everyone fears me,” I said.
    “Even your friends?”
    I swallowed down the bitterness his words brought up.  
    “Yes. Even my friends.”
    “Not all of them, though. There’s one who is not afraid.”
    “I can’t think of him right now,” I said, too quickly. “I’m here to help you, remember? To save Bobby.”
    “I can help you, too, you know,” said Aki, looking at me slyly. “It goes both ways.”
    “I don’t need your help,” I said. “I like to be able to trust the people around me.”
    “Well, we both know that’s a lie. You forgive faster than you trust.”
    He didn’t talk any more after that because the cold became suddenly overwhelming. For a few moments I couldn’t get my breath. When I did, it felt like my lungs filled with ice, as if the lightest of blows would shatter them. With each step, my limbs grew heavier, the numbness setting in quickly and crawling up my arms and thighs. I couldn’t feel my face and my eyelashes became stiff, making it hard to blink. Aki didn’t seem to be suffering from the same problems, but was looking around, alert, searching for the source of the cold.
    I forced myself to trudge forward, past a dirty convenience store, through the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. Aki was giving off black smoke, but it didn’t seem to slow him down. I was struggling to keep up with his casual stroll. There was a flare of heat in my core, something that was keeping me from freezing solid like the last time.
    We walked straight into the bright white funnel of snow and ice and wind. And there she was, standing atop a pile of ice pushed into a great mound that was taller than I was. I squinted. Not ice. I looked at the blue crystallized shapes under the Yuki-onna. I made out the lithe shapes of arms and legs. Hair. The pale and unseeing eyes of hundreds of bodies frozen solid with the blue that now writhed in the gilded birdcage that hung from her hand. She saw me and smiled, her small teeth colored red. Her eyes slid past me and landed on Aki.  
    “Why have you brought him?” she said, seeming more hurt than angry.
    “I had to,” I said. “He was going to kill my only friend.”
    “I could be your friend.” Her voice echoed quietly in my head. “We could rid the world of all of them. All these barbaric men. They take our dignity, they take our children, and they shut us away. But you and I, we could make them cry. Our names would be the last sigh on their pale, cold lips.”
    “They took your child?” I said. For a moment, the Yuki-onna looked absolutely human. The hurt in her eyes, the slope to the shoulders, the trembling lip. But then she straightened and remembered herself. And there was nothing in her eyes but cold cruelty.
    “They will take yours too,” she said. “He wants to kill me.”
    “Yes,” I said.  
    “And what do you want? Do you want to save me? Have you looked into my soul and decided that I’m worth it? That I could be fixed?”
    “No,” I said. “I don't think you have a soul.”
    “He doesn’t have one either,” she said, motioning to Aki. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The endless nothing inside of him. It is frightening, is it not?”
    “It is,” I said.
    “Imagine what it’s like to have it inside of you,” she hissed from somewhere deep in my head.
    Aki had been silent thus far, but he spoke now. “Enough,” he said, his voice strange and hollow. The Yuki-onna stopped her whispers and looked at him. Fear. It was all over her. Even her writhing blue heart seemed to have his attention.  
    “What did you do?” I said, staring at the Yuki-onna, rigid and unmoving on the mountain of corpses.  
    “This is why I’m here,” said Aki, not taking his eyes from the Yuki-onna. “If you interfere