Blood Ninja by Nick Lake Read Free Book Online

Taro’s arm. “Show your friend your wound.”
    Taro held out his forearm, showing the pink scar where the shuriken had pierced the skin and muscle. Then he held up the throwing star he had taken from it. The points were still wet with his blood.
    “Those ninjas were trying to kill him,” said Shusaku. “By turning him, I made their job harder. I wish …” He took a long breath. “I wish I had not had to do that. But there were too many of them.”
    “But …,” said Hiro. “ Kyuuketsuki aren’t real.” He was staring at the miraculously healed flesh, though, and Taro could tell that he was having trouble reconciling his deep-held beliefs with the evidence before his eyes.
    Shusaku’s eyes sparkled, and Taro thought he might be smiling. “Had you ever seen a ninja before tonight? And yet you can’t deny that they are real.”
    Hiro shook his head in disbelief. “But … ninjas are different from kyuuketsuki . … I mean, ninjas are men, and vampires are—”
    “Actually,” said Shusaku, “they’re not different. All ninjas are vampires.”
    “All of them?” said Taro, incredulous.
    “Of course. Vampires are faster than ordinary men, stronger and more agile. And have you ever heard of a ninja doing his work by day? Never. They operate only by night—silent, stealthy, deadly. It makes perfect sense that ninjas should be vampires.”
    Hiro looked bewildered. “And now … Taro is …”
    “One of us, yes.”
    “What does that mean?” said Taro. “I mean, I know that I can heal quickly, but … vampires suck blood, don’t they?” He felt sick at the thought of it.
    “Yes. We do. But not all of us are killers.”
    “Not all of you?”
    “Our friends on the beach have a somewhat different code from the one I live by. They belong to what you might call a different clan. When they feed, they kill their victims.” Taro thought of the villager who had been drained of his blood, the one the ronin had mentioned. “Me, I take only enough blood to survive. I will teach Taro to do the same. I believe that killing my food is inexcusable. You might say that I am a better Buddhist than most villagers. They don’t hesitate to kill fish. Me, I kill nothing!” He laughed.
    “You kill ninjas,” said Taro, not sharing the man’s amusement.
    “Well, yes,” said Shusaku, almost like a scolded child. “That’s different. I was doing it to save you.”
    “If they’re not your clan, then why were you with them?” asked Hiro.
    “One of their number recently died of a terrible accident. Their leader had signed a document requesting that I join the team instead.”
    “Why would he do that?” asked Taro.
    “I think he hoped I might show him mercy if he did.”
    “Did you?”
    “No.”
    There was silence for a moment. Taro’s father had been killed, his mother was gone who knew where, and he had been turned into a monster from a story. Now he sat in a boat with a ruthless killer who had thought nothing of gutting a man from behind with his short-sword. Could a kyuuketsuki ever become a samurai—ever become a hero? He thought it unlikely.
    But, least likely of all, he found that he quite liked Shusaku. The man seemed neither good nor bad—and Taro was beginning to wonder whether the black and white world of the samurai stories he had loved was only that—stories, told to children, to convince them that there were such things as heroes and monsters in the world.
    Perhaps, he thought, the two were sometimes combined in the same creature.
    And anyway, the man that Shusaku had so dishonorably killed in Taro’s hut had only moments before cut off the head of Taro’s sick, defenseless father—so the manner of his death seemed appropriate. It struck Taro that this world of violence and action was far from the glamorous arena of duels, honor, and romance that he had imagined.
    He licked his lips, feeling the sharpness of his canine teeth. It was only when he saw Hiro looking at him with a distinctly