Tengu Prince ( Novel Exceprt)

As I stand contemplating my next move, a jolt of pain slices through me like a knife to my heart. It comes from the scent of jasmine floating on the breeze, bringing with it the raw memory of my mother the night of her death. Has her spirit finally decided to join me on this night of the dead?

The sound of footsteps approaching behind jerks me from the bittersweet recollection. I spin around to face a woman, dressed in a black kimono. Beneath thick, dark lashes, she watches me. Her ruby eyes capture my gaze, luring me toward her.

I cannot help wondering why this woman is in the graveyard, alone in the dead of night. As I stand mesmerized by her terrible eyes, a finger of moonlight breaks through the gray-black clouds overhead. The next instant, a silver digit from the moon stabs at the woman’s face.

A nerve-jarring hiss escapes her pale lips. She throws her hands forward like a shield. In place of the youngish woman, there now hovers a hideous hag, clothed in hanging rags. The cloth’s tattered ends blow in the wind, reeking of decay and death.

I suck in my breath, pulling back out of harm’s way. The finger of moonlight becomes a hand sweeping over the crone. As if being shoved, she recedes into the darkness. The next instant, thunderheads bleed together across the heavens, blocking out the moonlight.

As a child, I heard terrifying accounts from the traveling priests who came to visit Haguro monastery. Often, they would weave bizarre tales around the evening campfires. With jarring recollection, I remember the stories concerning ghosts and other frightful fantasies. The most gruesome were those told of demon spiders as large as humans. Solitary creatures that dared not venture from the abandoned castles or hidden caves, which comprised their dwellings.

The visiting priest, his face aglow with firelight, spoke in hushed tones. “Known as the “Spider People,” the demon shapeshifters can change from arachnid form to human. They also possess other more hideous shapes that would make the skin of most crawl with disgust and terror.

“Food is all they care for. Some, fresh from the womb, they would devour their own mother while the giver of their lives writhed in agony.”

I spin away from the graveyard and run. The hag must have been sent from the Kumo-spider clan.