Koyasan by Darren Shan Page B

have to do in return?” Koyasan asked suspiciously.
    The spirits chuckled. “Sssstay here, of courssssse. With ussss. To be tortured and killed in our own good time.”
    “No!” Koyasan moaned. “There must be some other way, something else that I can...”
    “No,” the spirits snapped. “Sssswap yoursssself for your sssisssster, now, or we kill you both. Choossssssssse!” the spirits crowed, and then everything went silent.

NO
     
    Koyasan had no real choice. The spirits had her where they wanted her. If she said no to their offer, they’d kill her and let Maiko’s soul perish when the sun rose. Koyasan couldn’t save herself. The spirits would slaughter her no matter what she did. If she rejected their deal and fought, the best she could hope for was a quick, painless death. But that would mean letting Maiko die too. It would be better if she agreed to their terms and let them torture her. That way, at least Maiko would live. Better one die horribly and one live than both perish.
    Koyasan opened her mouth to agree to the spirits’ terms ... then closed it without saying a word.
    There was no need to rush her decision. She had a few minutes to play with. She’d learnt tonight that you should never abandon hope. Her situation had looked bleak each time she’d faced a spirit, and her initial instinct had been to surrender quickly to them. But by delaying and employing her wits, she’d survived.
    “Yes,” the inner voice remarked drily, “but those were individual spirits. You can’t fight or trick this many. You’re finished.”
    “Not necessarily,” Koyasan replied silently. “These spirits were human once. You can always bargain with humans. Everybody wants a better deal in life — why should it be any different in death? If I can offer them something more attractive than my torture and murder...”
    “Like what?” the voice sneered.
    Koyasan didn’t respond. She was remembering the bitterness in the spirits’ voices when they complained about her being alive, all the people she could mix with, the many things she, as one of the living, could experience. These spirits were confined to the graveyard. Nothing ever happened here. They had nobody to interact with, nothing to break the boredom.
    Children came in the daytime, but the spirits could only watch them enviously as they played and enjoyed themselves. And at night they were alone here, nothing new to experience or do, prisoners of eternity. Koyasan could see how hatred had grown and spread here, why they wanted to torture and kill her. They weren’t evil by nature — they just wanted to do something different for once, to relieve the misery and boredom.
    They thought killing was their only option. Everybody in the village feared and avoided the spirits. There was nothing they could do with Koyasan except murder her, so that was what they’d made up their minds to do. But they were wrong. If Koyasan could conquer her fear, and think of the spirits as lonely souls rather than malicious agents of destruction, maybe they could come to an arrangement by which all of them would benefit.
    It was hard to overcome the beliefs of a lifetime. Koyasan had always been terrified of the spirits. She’d been raised to think of them as wholly evil, beyond approach or compromise. But she’d undergone a transformation tonight. The world no longer looked as simple as it had the day before. Maybe the dead were like the living, neither entirely good nor entirely evil by nature, instead moulded by how they’d lived and how other people treated them.
    Koyasan gathered her courage, took a deep, steadying breath, then said, very softly, “No.”
    The spirits didn’t have physical eyes, but she nevertheless had the sensation of thousands of eyelids blinking at the exact same time.
    “What?” the spirits said, too astonished to make their voices sound ominous and threatening.
    “I won’t swap.”
    “But you have to!” the spirits protested. “We’ll kill