Page 72 of Between Ghosts and Gods

“This woman will help us.” Her mother gestured to the stranger she had brought into their home. “She says she knows ancient magicks, but she’ll need your help. The pendant is proof of our inheritance! Proof that we don’t belong here! That we deserve better than this! If you help the lady get it for me, you and your sister will never go hungry again!”

Her mother’s fingers dug into Kasu’s shoulders so deep they hurt.

“Please. Do this for me. Do this for your sister. It’s the only way.”

Except the woman was not a woman but a demon wearing a mask that could conceal her true self. Lady Camellia was very thorough when going over the contract.

“And when you die, you will work for me,” Lady Camellia crooned in a voice like the rustle of dead leaves.

“Kasu, listen to me! You can control it! Open your eyes!”

Someone was calling her, their voice distant and watery, as if they were somewhere far, far below the sea. Kasu could barely make sense of the words. She was hungry, so very hungry. And she was empty, so very empty.

“Where’s mother?”

Her sister looked up from the straw bed she had been confined to. Her eyes were as dull as her sallow skin. When she spoke, exhaustion coloured her voice.

“She left.”

Kasu’s gaze darted to the wicker baskets they used to store what few things they had. Their mother’s clothes were missing. The pendant was gone too.

Fear reared up inside Kasu like a snorting bull. Maybe their mother had gone to sell the clothes. After all, when they all returned to their rightful home, they would have no need for those rags.

“She can’t be gone! Wait here, I’ll go find her!”

Kasu turned and ran. Her sister’s shout devolved into a fit of wet coughs, but Kasu did not hurry back to her. She had to find mother first.

“Kasu! Kasu!”

It took five days to find her. Kasu’s mother was in the next town over, pleading with an officer to lend her a carriage back to her old home.

“I’m their daughter, see?” Her mother was on her knees, clinging to the officer’s shoe and holding up the jade pendant.

“I don’t know where you got that from, but their only daughter died sixteen years ago, everyone knows that!” The man growled and kicked her away.

Kasu’s mother gathered herself up. Their eyes met.

Then her mother turned away.

There was a corpse inside her home.

It lay on the straw bed with its eyes open, glassy and unseeing. At some point, dogs had come in through the unsecured door – the door that let the wind in no matter how many times Kasu tried to straighten its wonky hinges. The dogs had gnawed at the corpse’s legs.

Kasu lay down next to it and closed her eyes.

She tried to fill the grief and the hunger with rage, but all it did was live alongside them, consuming her from the inside out.

Kasu didn’t remember dying. All she recalled was a hunger that hollowed out her bones. An emptiness that echoed within her. A rage that churned deep inside her gut.

She thought of her mother and cried. After a while, the cries turned to screams. Kasu pounded her fists against the floor until they bled. She broke her teeth from grinding them so hard. She was empty and hungry and angry. Hatred burned with every painful breath. She cursed her mother, she cursed the men who had abandoned them, the family that had disowned them.

A cat with two tails stood above her. Their fur was of the darkest black, dotted with silver and purple and blue as if the cosmos swirled inside their belly.

A curse.

Kasu had smiled.

Then she had died.