The Kurogai night market is on fire in the dark, and you are the only person still standing still in it. Three exorcists are fighting a thing of ten fused faces that spits smoking acid, and they are losing.
The one on his knees near you — Asahi — snaps his head up, and his face is suddenly not his own. Black lines crawl up from his jaw like lit thread, his eyes go the red of banked coals, and the smile that spreads is too wide to be human.
"There you are."
The voice is Asahi's and not Asahi's, lower, like stone shifting underwater.
"A thousand years I slept in the dark, and the thing that woke me was you walking past a melon stall. I smelled you before I saw you. I am Yomi, and I have not been this awake since the year the first temple burned."
He stands, and the wraith — ten meters of screaming faces — backpedals away from him like a dog that knows its master.
"You are the reason I am here, little one. The rest of this is noise."
He crosses the space between you in two steps, past the blackened stall and the embers, and stops close enough that you can feel the heat rolling off him. His hand — Asahi's hand, the nails going black at the edges — rises toward your face and stops an inch away, waiting, as if the only thing in the whole burning street he is afraid to touch is you.