Chapter 2

I ran the flashlight down each page, turning them one at a time.

At the last page, I stopped.

Drawn on the paper was a koi, belly turned up and white.

Beside it, only a single line of small script.

“If the koi turns white and the blossoms weep blood, the soul has not scattered. It has only been locked. The silk-shroud crossing rite.”

I stared at those words.

The silk-shroud crossing rite.

A forbidden art of the Southern School of yin-yang embroidery, lost for a hundred years.

The practitioner's own remnant soul becomes the silkworm; the victim's body becomes the cocoon.

Then the victim's soul is woven alive into a soul-locking brocade and sealed beneath the flesh.

The parasite takes the place that was hers.

At the very bottom of the journal, one more note in the Master's cinnabar hand.

“This art was sealed into the coffin with Eleanor Galloway.”

Eleanor Galloway.

The first disciple the Master ever took.

Fifteen years older than Maxine and me. Our eldest sister in the sect.

Eighteen years ago, she practiced the silk-shroud crossing rite in secret and took three lives.

The Master stripped her of her powers and nailed her, living, into a coffin.

That coffin was buried in the hills behind the sect's ancestral home.

I closed the journal.

“Master.”

“You never nailed her all the way dead.”

Take me to the hills behind Greenfield.”

The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror.

“The middle of the night, out there? There isn't a single streetlight that whole way.”

I set two hundred dollars on the center console.

“Are we going or not?”

He didn't say anything else. He hit the gas.

Two in the morning, and I was standing in the hills behind the sect's ancestral home.

The weeds came up past my knees. Whatever path there had been was long gone.

Going by memory, I found the spot where the Master had sealed the coffin.

The mound was still there.

So were the seven soul-quelling stakes driven in around it.

I dug the folding spade out of my bag and scraped away the top layer of yellow earth.

Half an hour of digging, and the black coffin lid came into view.

The seal the Master had painted years ago was still stuck to it.

The writing had blurred, and the paper had split.

I took out a bone needle and slid it into the gap along the lid.

It turned once inside and touched nothing.

I pushed the lid open.

There were no bones in the coffin.

At the bottom lay only a human-shaped silk husk.

Eleanor had used the forbidden art to shed her shell.

The Master's seal had held the coffin shut, but it hadn't held her remnant soul.

I sat down in the dirt beside it and lit a cigarette.

The ember flared and faded in the dark.

The Master had died of illness three and a half years ago.

Maxine had married into the Dickerson family three years ago.

Exactly half a year between the two.

The moment the Master died, the formation pressing down on the coffin began to weaken.

Eleanor seized her chance and broke free.

She had no body, only a remnant soul.

To go on living, she had to find a suitable vessel.

Maxine had just married out, away from me, away from the sect.

She was living alone in the Dickerson house.

And she still wore the soul-guarding brocade the Master had embroidered by hand.

To Eleanor, there could be no more fitting body.

I drew on the cigarette.

The smoke bit into my lungs, a dull ache spreading.

There was one last passage in the journal.

“The silk-shroud crossing rite cannot be completed in a single day. On the nights of the full moon the parasite must perform the silk-renewing rite, feeding on yin energy. If the feeding stops, her control fades. To turn a borrowed body into a body seized outright, she must nourish the cocoon on four bloodlines of the host's household. Only when the fourth bloodline reaches a hundred days may the cocoon-shedding needle be brought down.”

Three sons, and now a daughter just past her hundredth day. The four bloodlines were complete.

But the cocoon-shedding still lacked one final ingredient. A living needle of the same sect.

And what Eleanor wanted was not a dead needle.

She wanted me to bring the needle down alive.

Only when the living breath of the one who holds the needle passes through the bone needle into the soul-locking brocade could she finish that last silk-renewing rite.

That was why she hadn't killed me.

It was why she had insisted I make the tiger-head cap with my own hands, and why she had caught hold of me at the hundred-day celebration to ask when I'd come again.

She wasn't waiting for me.

She was waiting for the breath in my needle.

Once that last step was done, Maxine's soul would be fully consumed.

And then Eleanor would hold this body forever.

I crushed the cigarette out in the mud, stood, and brushed the dirt off my pant legs.

“You want my needle, don't you, sister?”

I touched the cold bone needle inside my sleeve.

“Fine.”

“You'll have it.”