It darted in, so much like a snake, and bit her with a quick strike before pulling back. Those dreadful eyes studied her and the Hannya smiled.
As darkness began to swim in around the edges of her vision, Miho heard the ringing of the bells grow louder and more insistent. Then her senses began to fail her entirely, except that she could still smell Mai’s blood.
In the moment when the Hannya had been about to kill her father, Kara had frozen. Unable to breathe, unable to move, she could only stare as the impossible unfolded before her. It couldn’t be happening. Inside her head, she could hear herself screaming, but no sound came from her lips. The Hannya had locked eyes with her, pinning her with its gaze, but she knew that even if she hurled herself across the room she would never reach the demon in time to save him. She felt herself suffocating inside the Noh mask that covered her face.
Then Miho and Mai had surged from the shadowy stairwell and attacked the Hannya. As Kara gaped at their courage, Sakura ran at her father and practically tackled him, dragging him to the corner of the room, away from the chaos erupting at its center.
Hachiro and Ren began to shout. Mai screamed in pain. Kara saw blood. Sakura called out for Miho. Then Hachiro began to ring his bell and at last Kara snapped out of whatever momentary trance had paralyzed her.
She rang hers as well, and in a moment Ren and Sakura were doing the same. Leaving Kara’s father in the corner, Sakura moved in closer. Ren and Hachiro hurried to place themselves as evenly as possible around the Hannya and the three bodies that lay on the floor. Kara saw it all through the strange eyes of her Noh mask. Miss Aritomo remained unconscious, but Mai moaned, cradling her left arm, blood soaking into her shirt from a long gash in her face and a wound on her shoulder.
Miho fought weakly against the Hannya, beginning to go limp in its grasp. Just a few feet from them, the kitchen knife Miss Aritomo had fetched earlier lay on the floor. Kara wished she could get it and use it, but feared it might be useless against the Hannya.
“Louder!” Kara shouted.
She held the bell high and took a step closer, then another. The iron grew strangely warm in her hand and the smell of hot metal began to fill the room, and then she knew that all of their conjecture had been right-the bells were the weapon they needed.
Sakura, Ren, and Hachiro took her cue and they began to close the circle. It might only have been Kara’s imagination, but the voices of the bells seemed to join in a chorus so pure they became almost one sound, ringing together, loud and bright.
The Hannya shrank down upon itself as though to protect itself from attack. It hissed, but the sound of the bells contained the demon’s hiss, swallowed and silenced it. The shadows on the floor began to coalesce and the corners of the room grew darker, but Kara shook her bell harder, ringing it even louder, so that her fingers felt scorched by the heat of the metal. The others followed suit, and soon the shadows were only shadows, with none of the demon’s influence.
Its skin rippled, jaws opening again to reveal those needle fangs, and now its flesh seemed trapped between monster and serpent. It bulged and pulsed, shifting as if the Hannya were attempting to control its shape and failing.
The demon turned and reached for Miho, tongue darting out, jaws opening wide.
“Never!” Ren shouted, and stepped nearer.
The Hannya grinned up at him, fixing him in its yellow serpent’s gaze. But Hachiro, Sakura, and Kara matched Ren’s step, holding the circle firm, somehow caging it there.
Kara saw its gaze shift toward the prone form of Miss Aritomo and immediately she understood its intent.
“Hachiro!” she shouted. “Throw me the bag!”
Confusion filled his gaze, but he trusted her and did not hesitate. Hachiro tossed her the cloth sack that still contained two of the masks Miho had made for Dojoji. Kara dropped to her knees, still ringing her bell, and shoved her free hand into the sack. The first face she touched had horns, and she knew that wasn’t what she wanted. She yanked the other free of the cloth.
The Hannya started to move, but Kara leaped to Miss Aritomo’s side, covering her teacher’s face with the mask of Anchin, the monk who had resisted all of the Hannya’s attempts at seduction, and who had burned to death rather than surrender to it. Miss Aritomo had always said that the masks of the Noh had power, that they were imbued with such tradition that they could help transform the wearer into the character they played. Noh theater was more than just acting, it was inhabiting the legend, and letting the legend inhabit the actor. But the old demons and spirits were equally influenced. With no one left to worship them, they were controlled by the tales people still told about them-things like Noh theater.
To the Hannya, Miss Aritomo was now Anchin, and Anchin had never feared it.
It had lost its host.
The Hannya shrank back from Miss Aritomo and looked up in confusion. The demon hesitated, then shrieked in fury and lunged for Kara. She thrust the bell nearly into its face, ringing it loudly. This close to the Hannya, the metal grew so hot that she could barely stand to hold it, but she dared not drop the bell.
“Damn you!” the Hannya said, its voice a damp, slithery thing. It had become more serpent than woman or monster now, and rose up on its thick snake’s body, swaying in front of her.
It pointed at Miss Aritomo. “She summoned me here! And you dare to-”
“Liar!” Kara’s father shouted, springing away from the wall.
“Dad, stay back!” Kara snapped.
She needn’t have feared. Her father was an intelligent man. He kept well away from the circle that the four of them had created with the ringing of their bells and the power of the Noh masks-the Hannya saw the people of the temple who had destroyed it once already, heard the bells of the monks.
“It lies!” Rob Harper shouted. Then he sneered at the Hannya, pointing at Miss Aritomo himself. “Yuuka never summoned you, she honored you. And this is how you repay her?”
Its voice weak and ragged with pain, the Hannya laughed.
“You are right, of course, teacher. But this woman you love opened the window for me to enter.”
Kara watched as it diminished further, shrinking to become the ebony, horned serpent-part flesh and part smoke-that she had seen before.
“Louder!” she told her friends. “Close the circle!”
And they did. She saw the pain in their faces and knew that the iron bells must have been searing their skin just as hers did, but they did not hesitate. The serpent twisted and coiled in upon itself, then it whipped around and stared at Kara herself, those hypnotic serpent’s eyes locking with hers.
“I won’t be the last, girl. You know that. You all do. My sister Kyuketsuki put her curse upon you and it calls to the rest of us like the scent of fresh prey. Worse things than I will come for you, and you and all that you love will die.”
Movement to her left caught Kara’s attention and she risked a glance, only to see Wakana stumbling into the circle. For a heartbeat, she was too astonished at seeing the girl alive, and too busy trying to put together how she came to be there-that Mai must have freed her from the attic along with Miho-that she didn’t even have a chance to cry out to warn Wakana.
Then she saw the kitchen knife glinting in Wakana’s hand and realized she had picked it up off the floor.
“Some of us have already lost what we loved,” Wakana said, tears streaming down her face.
The serpent twisted round to face her, but too late. Wakana slashed the blade through the air and sliced the horned serpent’s head from its body.
It flopped to the floor in two pieces, a final hiss rising from it-though, this time, of steam. A horrible stench filled the house, a smell of sickness and death, and the shadows puffed up from the serpent like smoke, drifting away.