Page 33 of Cherry Moon

“Ready, you say?”

I jumped, turning on the spot at the sound of a woman’s voice speaking in Japanese.

“Who’s there?”

“The end.”

Ugh. “Oh, that’s a new one.” I rolled my eyes, disguising the boulder of stress in my tummy.

The speaker appeared on my left, halfway up the curved wall as if perched on a ledge. A thin, pale-skinned woman with half her face covered in flesh, the other half was just an exposed skull.

Yikes.

White rags hung from her emaciated body, wisps of straggly black hair clinging to a flaking scalp.

She lifted her right arm, the skin wrinkled. Her hand was nothing but flesh-free bone, her index finger pointed directly at me.

“Here he is.” Her voice was raspy and grim. The kind of sound to curdle milk. “The Taker. Akira Murakami.” The color of her eyes shifted between the phases of the Cherry Moon—pale pink to red and back again.

Her mouth didn’t move, those thin blue lips looking like they were glued together.

My kingdom for a sledgehammer. “Who are you?”

“Born of the mazoku,” she stated, “and the glorious magic around us.”

I folded my arms, dread my new bestie.

Made with the help of tenshi magic? This sucked. Hard. In the bad way.

She put her arm down. “I am the first to awaken. The one to end you, to feed on the joy of your undoing.”

“Another one I haven’t heard before,” I drawled. “Oh, and…” I snapped my fingers. “Good luck trying.”

What the hell were the mazoku doing with the Cherry Moon magic?

“There is nothing but your end here,” she rambled on. “You will see your failure. You will feel it, drown in its delicious potency.”

A clear oval cleared in a section of the bowl, becoming a screen. It showed me the room at the safehouse, and the body in the middle of it.

The dead body.

G’s dead body.

Ice filled my veins, the world going on pause.

He lay there on his back with wide eyes, his throat cut, blood pooling beneath him. His light snuffed out, nothing more than a lonely corpse.

Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

I’ve lost him…

“This… This…” I lumbered forward, trying to climb up the wall to the screen. I slipped, smacking a knee off the bone before sliding back down. “No…”

“This is the price you pay, Taker,” the woman spoke. “You took, we take.”