The Night Itself by Zoe Marriott

“I don’t mean … I remember what you said, but who
are
you? Why—” I almost chickened out, then forced myself to say it. “Why have we been dreaming about each other?”
    Suddenly he had that wary, vulnerable look again. “You have seen me in your dreams?”
    “Yes. For a long time. Years.” I tried to figure out his expression. “I saw you fighting that monster. I saw you turn it into stone, and then I saw… I saw you …”
Die
. “… fall.”
    His lips pressed together. “The connection runs both ways then. Did you see anything else? Did you see what happened after that?”
    A green blade flashing down in the red light…
I frowned as the memory jolted through me. “Not really. What did happen?”
    “Mio-dono, the last thing I remember that is real to me is the battle you saw in your dream. I was struck down, and I thought I would die and go to meet my ancestors. Instead … when at last I awakened, I was trapped. I know not where. There was no light. No nothing. Only confinement and blackness and cold. Endless cold. There was no time for me in that place. I might have been trapped for minutes or days or months or … longer. I faded in and out of awareness, and I wondered, when I could make space within my suffering to wonder, if I was in Yomi, punished, or exiled, or forgotten by the gods.”
    “That’s – that’s horrible.”
    “But then something changed,” he said, leaning further into me. “I began to see things in the dark. See and hear and feel. I saw an impossible place, with buildings like mountains, where people spoke a strange, garbled tongue. I saw monstrous machines, and great wonders. And I saw…”
    “Me and Jack?” I finished, remembering what he had said before.
    “When you were together, yes. Mainly, I saw
you
. Felt you…” His eyes dropped to my lips. “I saw everything that you did. Heard what you did. I felt what you felt, and knew when you were sad, hungry, angry, afraid… It is from you that I learned to speak this language – English?”
    I nodded dumbly.
    “I have seen this world before, through your eyes. Though it is very different being here in my own body. Being able to see and hear for myself, being able to touch…” His tanned fingers flexed on his knee, millimetres from mine. His hand was long and bony, and flecked with tiny white scars.
    “Then when you said you didn’t know how you’d got here or where you came from, you
literally
meant that. The last thing that happened to you was—”
    Death
.
    He nodded, his face grave and set.
    “And then” – I snapped my fingers – “you’re free, and you appear here, just in time to save me from a horrible death?”
    His eyes flashed up to mine. A beautiful, slightly crooked smile spread over his face, lighting it up like a sudden blinding flash of the sun through thick clouds on a cold day. And just as suddenly, it was gone, leaving him thoughtful again.
    “Yes,” he breathed. “Just in time. Mio-dono, I was with you yesterday when you entered the dark room upstairs in your parents’ house and took out the sword – my sword. But I saw something you did not see. When you laid hands on it you … you burst into light, into white flames that swirled around you and through you. Almost at once you began to feel things and see things. Shades, shadows, things that weren’t there. Those flames did something to you. The sword did something to you.”
    “Wait. What about that guy? That guy who called himself the Harbinger. Was he real? Did I hallucinate him too?”
    “No,” Shinobu said emphatically. “He was real. Even in the cold and dark I could feel his power. I do not know what he is, but he is … inimical to humans.”
    “Then I got hit by that car,” I said slowly, following events back in my mind. “I thought I was going to die, but I heard a voice, telling me it would be all right. It was your voice.”
    He lifted his head again. His eyes almost nailed me to the seat with their