Blood Ninja Read Free Page A

could give to their son.
    But Taro had been in the healer’s hands, and the Buddha’s, and they could do nothing for him. Finally, on the seventh day, Taro awoke from fever dreams. His wound was already healing and, miraculously, infection had been held at bay. He returned to find a new brother in his home.
    A couple of years ago, though, Hiro had earned enough from his wrestling and fishing to acquire a small shack only a few hundred meters from the sea that had taken his parents. Hanging from a wooden nail above the door was the open jaw of a shark, white against the dark wood.
    Even now, when Taro saw the jaws and their serrated teeth,he would sometimes shudder. But Hiro would never get rid of the thing. It was a talisman, almost, of their friendship—a tangible reminder of what Taro had done for him.
    That day itself was a little blurred in Taro’s memory, by time and also because for many days afterward he had been unconscious, first from blood loss and later from fever. It had been a bright summer’s day, the breeze bringing scents of pine and dry seaweed. Taro had been up on the headland, playing with his bow. The first he had known something was wrong was when he’d heard screams, and looked down to see a little boat in the bay, people splashing around it.
    He’d seen the blood next.
    The villagers had warned the refugees from inland about the mako who patrolled the waters, the sleek, large sharks that followed the tuna. But the inlanders must have thought it just a superstition, or a story made up to frighten them, perhaps because there were no monsters to kill people where they came from, only samurai and wars.
    Hiro’s parents, ignoring the warnings, had cut up their fish and thrown them into the water around their boat, thinking to attract more fish into their nets. All they had attracted was a mako , and it had capsized their boat with no trouble at all.
    Of course, Taro hadn’t known any of that then. All he’d known was that someone was in trouble. He ran down to the beach, threw himself into the water, and swam out, not thinking for one moment of his own safety. Diving into the murk, he found a chubby young boy, drowning. He seized the boy and dragged him back to shore.
    “My mother!” gasped the boy when Taro dragged him onto the sand. “Did you see my mother?”
    Taro shook his head, winded.
    “A monster came from the sea and … bit her,” said the boy. “I tried to find her, but I can’t swim, and my father can’t either …”
    Taro looked out again at the dark slick on the sea, and pursed his lips grimly. A mako attack. The boy’s parents were surely dead. But he couldn’t just leave it at that. Without a word to the boyhe checked that his knife was in his belt and dived again into the waves, swimming out toward the slick.
    He didn’t find anything, but when he was swimming back to shore, he did feel a rough impact against his side, and then the shark was circling and coming for him again, its mouth open. The salt water stinging his open eyes, he fumbled the knife from his belt, and that was when the shark collided with his shoulder, biting down, and he felt pain flooding his chest.
    Blood ribboned from his wound into the clear water. He was surprised that alongside his pain he felt no fear. Only an all-consuming fury at this beast that had orphaned the boy on the beach, and looked like it was going to kill him too. Dizzy from the bleeding and the pain of moving his arm, Taro snapped his hips aside on the shark’s next pass, threw his arms around the coarse, rough body, and stabbed down with his knife.
    After that, Taro’s memory failed him, but he must have fought like a demon from Enma’s hell realm, because his father said the shark was more wound than flesh in the end. When it was dead—and this was the part Taro could never remember, but that had bonded Hiro to him forever—Taro dragged its weight into shallow water, then hauled the carcass up onto the sand.
    Collapsing to