Chapter 1: Piss on Sacred Ground
The forest had stolen days from him. Anjin’s boots were clotted with mud, his sailor’s hands torn by bamboo fronds that sliced like knives. He pushed through a final curtain of weeping vines and stopped, his breath catching not in wonder, but in dull, practical relief.
A shrine. Or the corpse of one.
A moss-covered torii gate sagged ahead, its timber gone soft with rot. Beyond it, a small building hunched beneath the canopy, its wooden walls silvery-grey and eaten by time. The clearing was silent, deeply silent, as if the very air had been pressed flat. No birdsong, no insect hum. Only the drip of condensation from broad leaves and the low, rhythmic whisper of something moving through the bamboo far behind him. Or maybe beside him. His ears had begun playing tricks days ago.
His thirst was a raw scrape in his throat. His bladder was a swollen, painful stone. He’d held it for hours, refusing to foul the winding path, some stubborn relic of his English sensibilities. But here, in this dead place, the urgency became overwhelming. It was just a ruin. God had forsaken this patch of heathen ground as surely as He had forsaken Anjin in this damned country.
He staggered under the torii, its shadow cold on his sun-burned neck. He moved to the side of the main structure, near a mossy stone lantern tipped on its side. He fumbled with the ties of his trousers, rough hemp stiff with salt and sweat. The relief was instantaneous, a hot stream splattering against the ancient, weathered stone, cutting a dark track through the velvet moss. The sound was loud, obscenely human in the quiet.
The ground pulsed.
A single, deep throb, like a heartbeat through the earth. The stream at his feet didn’t just soak in. It steamed. A faint, phosphorescent warmth rose from the stone, and the scent changed—from petrichor and decay to something cloying, sweeter than honey, layered beneath with the tang of hot copper.
He jerked back, stuffing himself away, his heart hammering against his ribs. A whisper slithered through the air, not around him, but inside his skull. It was the sound of silk tearing, of a woman’s sigh stretched thin over centuries.
You are not lost.
He spun, scanning the clearing. Nothing. The bamboo whispered. The drips fell. A tremor started in his hands, a fine vibration that climbed his arms. He made the sign of the cross. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” he mumbled, the Latin tasting like dust.
A laugh echoed, light and musical. It came from the doorway of the shrine, where only shadows had been.
She stood there, leaning against the rotten frame as if it were the post of a royal bedchamber. Her kimono was the color of a midnight sky, shot through with threads that glimmered like stars, hanging open at the front to reveal a cascade of raven hair and skin so pale it seemed lit from within. Her face was a heart-stopping betrayal of all beauty, crafted to hook into the deep, animal part of a man’s mind. Her lips were full, parted in a smile that showed perfect, small teeth. And her eyes… they held him. They were a deep, molten amber, but as he watched, a ring of blood-red seeped in from the edges, staining the iris.
“You marked my home,” she said. Her voice was a physical touch, a cool finger tracing his spine. “Such a crude, desperate claim. But a claim nonetheless.”
Anjin’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “I… I meant no defilement. I believed this place abandoned.”
“Abandoned?” She pushed off from the frame and glided toward him. Her feet did not seem to touch the moss. “I am here. I have been here for four hundred years. You poured your salt, your heat, your animal need onto my stone. I felt it.” Her amber-red eyes flicked down, then back to his face. “I saw it.”
Shame, hot and prickling, washed over him. He thought of Martha, her plain, good face, her sturdy piety waiting across the world. The memory was a shield. He gripped it. “Leave me be, spirit. I want no part of your games.”
“Games?” She was before him now, so close the strange, sweet scent enveloped him—ancient perfume and that undernote of copper. She raised a hand, and with a single, cold fingertip, traced the line of his jaw. He flinched as if branded. “This is no game, Anjin. It is law. You showed me your flesh. By the oldest compact, that flesh is now mine to acknowledge.”
He recoiled. “How do you know my name?”
“I tasted your water. I know the map of your body. The scars on your knee from a Bristol cobblestone. The loneliness in your chest for a wife whose face is beginning to blur.” Her smile widened, cruel and knowing. “The hardness you feel now, fighting your prayers.”
He was. God help him, he was. Despite the terror, a traitorous heat had pooled in his gut, a rigid ache growing against his thigh. It was a mechanical response, a sin of the body, but it felt like a betrayal of everything.
“This is a demon’s temptation,” he snarled, forcing the words out. “Get thee behind me.”
“But I am in front of you,” she purred. Her hand darted out, too fast to avoid, and closed over the front of his trousers. Her touch was icy fire. He cried out, a strangled gasp, as she gripped him through the rough fabric, her fingers applying a precise, tormenting pressure. “See? It speaks a truer confession than your tongue ever will.”
He shoved her away, stumbling back. His body screamed at the loss of contact. She merely laughed, the sound echoing from the trees.
“You will be back,” she whispered, and her form began to dissolve, like ink in water. “The curse is in your blood now. You will feel it burn. You will dream of me. And you will learn that the only cleansing for your type of sin… is a deeper sin. A profound humiliation. Remember that.”
She was gone. The clearing was just a clearing, a ruin in a forest. The scent faded.
Anjin ran. He crashed through the bamboo, blind with panic, until his lungs burned and he collapsed against a broad tree trunk. He prayed. He prayed until the words became a meaningless chant. But his body still throbbed, and his mind replayed the icy-hot clasp of her hand.
That night, in the makeshift lean-to he built, the dreams came.
Not dreams. Visitations.
He was back in the shrine clearing, but it was transformed. The moss was lush, sensual velvet. The air was thick and warm. She lay upon it, her kimono a pool of darkness around her waist, her upper body bare. Her breasts were full, tipped with rose, and her eyes were entirely red now, glowing like banked coals.
“Your prayers are just noise,” she said, her voice the only sound. “This is what you are.”
In the dream, he was on his knees before her. He could not move. He could only watch as she spread her legs. The thatch of hair at her junction was jet black, glistening. She trailed her own fingers down the pale plane of her stomach, lower, and parted herself. He saw the pink, intricate flesh, dewy and inviting.
“You want to taste it,” she whispered. “You want to bury your righteous face in it and drink. You want to be drowned in a woman’s essence. It is the only thing that will quench the thirst I have put in you.”
He tried to say no. He tried to recite the Lord’s Prayer. In the dream, his mouth watered.
“But first,” she cooed, shifting her hips. “A simpler sacrament. Your body betrayed you with water. You will be cleansed with it. The cure is to drink. From a woman. From me. That is the way to break the bond.”
She smirked, and the scene shifted. He was beneath her, and a hot, golden stream arced from her body towards his open, paralyzed mouth—
He awoke with a choked scream, drenched in cold sweat. The dawn light was grey and sickly. His whole body was trembling. And the thirst was back, worse than before, a desert in his throat. But intertwined with it was a new, hideous, specific hunger. A craving that turned his stomach even as it made his cock stir painfully against his leggings.
The curse was in his blood. It was learning him. It was teaching him what he was.
He fumbled in his pack, his fingers closing around the small, leather-bound Bible. He pressed it to his forehead, the cool leather a shock. He whispered the names of the Gospels.
From the forest, borne on a wind that touched no leaf, her laugh came again.
The book grew warm in his hands. Then hot. He dropped it with a yelp. On the pristine vellum of the frontispiece, where his name was inscribed, a damp, yellow-brown stain spread from the center, warping the parchment, blurring the ink. The smell of ammonia, sharp and unmistakable, rose from the pages.
Her whisper was inside his head, intimate and final.
You have no scripture here, sailor. Only my law. And you have already begun to obey.