Chapter 3: Two Moons
Kusakabe Atsuya comes to see you two days later, which is how you know it's bad.
He's a grade-one sorcerer, like you, and an instructor at the Tokyo branch, and he hates leaving Tokyo almost as much as he hates paperwork. He sits across from you in your grandmother's house at the foot of the mountain with his tie loosened and a folder in his lap, and he doesn't open the folder for a long time.
"The body at the torii," he says finally. "Curse user. Freelance. He was carrying a key cut from a sample of your family's barrier, which means someone gave it to him. We're looking into that." He rubs his eyes. "The higher-ups are also looking into something else."
"Go on."
"The seal reports a change in its cursed energy signature. Your residue on him." Kusakabe has the decency to look at the ceiling. "His on you. A lot of it. Enough that the seal registered the keeper as, and I'm quoting the analysts here, 'substantially comingled.'"
You keep your face very still. "And?"
"And they're afraid. Of you, mostly. A keeper who's compromised is a keeper who might open the door." He finally opens the folder. "They want to transfer the vow. A three-sorcerer rotation, strangers to him, a different one every month, so he can't get his hooks into anyone. There's a procedure. It's risky, but it can be done at the next new moon."
"What does it cost me?"
He doesn't answer right away, which is an answer. "The transfer burns the vow out of you. Your technique might come back. It might not. But you'd be free. No more nights on that mountain." He says it gently, as if it's a gift.
You think about it for a long time after he leaves. You sit on the porch of your grandmother's house in the heat and look up at the cedars on the mountain, and you think about being free.
You think about four hands and one voice saying ask.
The ninth new moon. You climb the steps and the night comes down on you halfway up, and when you reach the top he is standing in the courtyard in the dark, waiting, with none of his usual sprawl.
"You're not alone," he says.
"No." Below you, at the foot of the steps, three sorcerers you've never met are standing in a triangle with the transfer seals already drawn on the stone. Kusakabe is with them. He looks miserable. "They want to give you to someone else. A rotation. Strangers, so you can't, quote, get your hooks into anyone."
All four of Sukuna's eyes go to the three figures below. The cursed energy that rolls off him then is nothing like what you're used to. It makes the lanterns gutter. It makes the cicadas stop.
"And you came up here," he says, very quietly, "to tell me goodbye."
"I came up here to ask you something."
He looks at you. You hold his gaze, all four eyes of it.
"Do you want them? Strangers, every month. They'll bring their own books. They won't argue about the author. None of them will ever know how to choose a daikon." Your voice wobbles. You let it. "Or do you want me?"
The silence that follows is the longest of your life, and you've lived through Shinjuku.
"I don't want," Sukuna says at last, and the words come out of him slowly, as if they've rusted. "I take. I have never once in a thousand years waited for anything." He steps toward you. "And I have waited eight months on this miserable mountain, under this miserable floor, for the one night a month you come up those steps and argue with me about radishes."
He stops in front of you. One hand comes up and touches your face. His hand isn't quite steady.
"I want you, keeper," he says. "Is that what you came to hear? Say it properly, then. Ask me properly."
You smile. You can't help it. You've been practising this all month.
You turn your back on him, which you have never done in nine months, and lay your palms flat on the cedar pillar of the main hall, and you pour your cursed energy into the seal. Not to tie it. To change it. A binding vow can be amended by the one who made it, if they're willing to pay the price, and you know exactly what you're willing to pay.
"I amend the vow," you say, and your voice carries down the steps and across the courtyard, and every barrier on the mountain hums with it. "The keeper's duty passes to no one else. It is bound to my life and only mine. If they try to transfer it, it fails." You take a breath. "And from now on the seal loosens twice a month. At the dark of the moon, and at the full."
The seal drinks it down. You feel it tear something out of you, a slice of your cursed energy that you will never get back. Then it settles, and holds, and you hear Kusakabe swear at the bottom of the steps.
You turn around.
Sukuna is staring at you. All four eyes wide. For once in his ancient life, he has nothing to say.
"There," you tell him, and your knees are shaking. "Now nobody's taking you from me. And you've got twice as many minutes."
He doesn't make it to the futon this time.
He has you down on the veranda boards in the lantern light, and you don't care that there are four sorcerers at the bottom of the steps; you threw up a privacy barrier on the way down without even thinking, and the last thing you see over his shoulder is Kusakabe turning very pointedly to face the forest. Sukuna's mouth is on yours, hard and hungry, nothing patient about it now. His hands tear at your clothes and you hear fabric rip and you don't care about that either.
"Ask," he says against your mouth, and for the first time it doesn't sound like a demand. It sounds like he needs to hear it.
"Everything," you tell him. "Yes. Everything. Don't you dare make me wait."
He doesn't. He pushes into you in one long, deep stroke, and you both cry out, and he stays there, buried in you, his forehead pressed to yours, all four arms locked around you as if he's afraid you'll vanish if he loosens his grip.
"You paid for this," he says hoarsely. "I felt it. You cut a piece out of yourself."
"I chose it."
"Foolish." He moves, a slow, grinding roll of his hips that makes you gasp. "Reckless. Stupid." Again, deeper. "Mine."
"Yes," you say. "Yours. Don't stop."
He takes you on the veranda of the shrine you built to cage him, under a sky with no moon in it, and it isn't the precise, cooking-a-feast attention of last month. It's rougher. Needier. He kisses you like he's starving, your mouth, your jaw, the hollow of your throat, your breasts, and every time he drives into you he says something against your skin, low and rough and half in an old dialect of Japanese no one has spoken in a thousand years. You don't need a translation. His lower hands grip your hips and pull you onto him to meet every stroke, and his upper hands brace against the boards, and the old wood creaks under you in rhythm.
You come once with his fingers working between your bodies and his teeth at your shoulder, sharp and almost too much and exactly right. He doesn't slow down. He rolls you over so you're straddling him, his hands on your waist guiding you, his upper hands reaching up to cup your face and drag you down for another bruising kiss, and you ride him with your palms flat on the black markings of his chest and your head thrown back, chasing it, chasing him.
"Look at me," he says, and you do. "Keep looking."
You do. You look at him while it builds, at the red eyes gone half-lidded and hot, the sharp mouth slack with something that looks almost like awe, and when you come again, it's with your eyes on his. You watch it hit him a second later. You watch the King of Curses come apart under you with your name in his mouth, his arms crushing you to his chest, his whole huge body shuddering.
Afterward he doesn't speak for a long time. He lies on the boards with you sprawled across him, his fingers sliding slowly through your hair, and the cicadas start up again in the cedars, one by one, as if nothing happened.
"Twice a month," he says at last.
"Twice a month."
"You'll bring food."
"I will bring," you say, "the best daikon in Kyoto."
He laughs, low and astonished, and the sound rolls through his chest into yours. Then he tips your chin up with one finger so that you have to look at him, and his voice drops to the place where he keeps the things he means.
"Listen carefully, keeper. I'll only say this once." All four eyes on you. "A thousand years, I never waited for anything. Then you." He turns your face into his palm, and holds it there. "I'll wait every month you give me. Every one. And I'll use every minute."
At the foot of the steps, someone coughs. Your privacy barrier is still up, and you can see Kusakabe's silhouette, his back to the shrine, raising one hand in a weary gesture that seems to mean we will talk about this later.
You don't care. The sky is still black. The moon is still gone.
"How many minutes left?" you ask.
Sukuna smiles against your hair, slow and sharp and entirely pleased with himself.
"Enough," he says, and rolls you under him again.