Page 47 of The Last Tiger

Something in her seems to deflate. The wild look fades from her eyes. She drops the knife.

“Okay.” She coughs again. “Fine, we can use them. You—”

She points to Eunji.

“You tie his hands.”

Jin opens the backpack she stole from the merchants in the woods and pulls out a length of packaging rope. Eunji stands and obeys, tying Kenzo’s wrists together.

“Tighter.”

Jin glances over at Eunji.

“I guess you’re too strong for the rope to hold you. Well, the two of you are going to walk right in front of us . You will not try to fight back. You will not try to escape. ”

They glare back at her.

“And you—” Jin points at Kenzo. “While we’re walking, you’re going to explain to us exactly how you acquired those powers of yours .”

“I was fifteen when I found the tiger’s cave.”

Kenzo speaks in a monotone as we march up the mountain.

The sun has turned a deep orange red as it nears the horizon; through the gold-colored foliage, it’s stunningly beautiful. Kenzo and Eunji walk in front of us with their hands clasped behind their backs, ensnared respectively by the rope and the invisible cuffs that Jin has placed in their minds.

Jin and I follow, Jin eyeing the two of them warily. The tiger takes up the rear, impassive; I wonder what she’s thinking. Her footsteps land silently on the rock path, unlike our heavy human steps, which send pebbles scattering under each foot.

“I was in a neighboring city not too far from Kidoh,” Kenzo continues emptily. “I had finally convinced my father to let me accompany him on a business trip. I was so happy at the time. Now I wish I’d never gone.

“I had always wanted to be a diplomat. But Father’s wish was for me to go into the military. We had a long fight about it one evening. Finally, he hit me, using a belt, then his fists. After he left the room, I ran out into the night.

“It was raining hard in the woods. My clothes were quickly soaked through; I thought I might pass out from the cold. But as I was starting to lose consciousness…a beam of moonlight shone down through the sky onto my body. That was when I saw it.”

Kenzo’s voice breaks. He glances behind him at the tiger.

“A tiger walked out from between the trees and touched its nose to my chest. I had no idea at the time what had happened. It wasn’t until…later that I realized my life had changed forever.

“After I returned home, I tried to put it out of my mind.” Kenzo wets his lips.

“But the tiger did something terrible to me that night that I’ve never been able to undo.

It wouldn’t leave me, wouldn’t let me go.

I started noticing strange colors in the air.

Over time I learned that I could influence others, affect their emotions.

Somehow, I had been granted a strange kind of power. Ki.

“I tore through the family library, looking for answers. Eventually I found it—an obscure entry on Tiger ki. I couldn’t believe it at first. I was supposed to be the heir to my family’s business, the pride and continuation of our lineage.

I was always going to have Dragon ki and serve the empire. That was my destiny .

“Suddenly that was taken from me. I had to see if it could be undone. I would have done anything. I snuck back to that town, looking for the tiger. When I found it in the woods, he led me back to his cave and appeared to me in spirit form. The Tiger spirit urged me to bring him to Mount Tangun, to help him restore balance to the Tiger Colonies.”

“And then what?” Jin looks sharply at him.

“I told him that I would help him.”

“And…did you?” I ask.

“No. I was frightened. And I hated him. I led the tiger out through the woods and straight back to Kidoh. Then I chained it to the police station before dawn and I walked away. They held the Slaying Ceremony soon after that, I guess.”

At that, I stop walking.

It’s not like I ever hated Kenzo Kobayashi personally, although I didn’t exactly love that Eunji was engaged to him.

But now, hearing his story, I feel a twist of disgust.

Eunji stops walking too. She turns to look back at me, shock written on her face.

The realization hits us both at once. The Tiger Slaying Ceremony where she and I first collided, the one that inspired our deal and tangled our lives together—

Kenzo turned that tiger in to the Dragon Empire.

And now, here we all stand, brought together again somehow by another tiger—

“I prayed that I would be free once the tiger was gone,” Kenzo says. “I knew that if the last tiger died, the ki powers would go away. The spirit told me so himself. I lay awake that night, praying that the strange powers would disappear.

“But they never did. They stuck with me. I was afraid then that I would never be free. Suddenly I hated myself. I hated this filthy, abominable Tiger ki coursing through my veins. I am of pure Dragon lineage. I am a Dragon scion . My family bloodline is impeccable. Why me? Why had this happened to me? How could I—Kenzo Kobayashi—be so tarnished? I couldn’t be like this. I couldn’t.

“I began to have nightmares. Nightmares that never stopped. The Tiger spirit would visit me in my dreams, vengeance in his eyes…sometimes he appeared to me as a severed head, or a headless corpse…”

Kenzo shudders, a glassy look passing over his eyes.

“The day of the Slaying Ceremony was the last day of peaceful sleep I ever had.”

“Is that why you came with me?” Eunji suddenly speaks up. “On this mission. All along, you wanted to capture the last tiger—so you could be rid of your ki.”

“What, you don’t believe that I wanted to protect you?” Kenzo flashes her a pained smirk.

“Protect me, my ass,” Eunji shoots back, before her brows knit in sudden confusion. “Hold on. How did you manage to survive Adachi? If you can’t even fight…”

“I can fight,” Kenzo replies swiftly, as if trying to convince himself. “Just…not the way you can…

“I realized right away that the dragon’s ritual would have no effect on me.

So I thought hard about what I should do.

If I was found out, I wouldn’t just be a laughingstock and a humiliation.

They could have had me executed. I thought long and hard about how to protect myself. There had to be a way out.

“I ended up forging a letter in my father’s hand, ordering the academy to have me tutored in private.

Then I used my ki powers to fill the drill captain with so much awe and admiration for me, I made him believe there was no need for me to learn from him.

That I was the greatest student Adachi had ever seen.

“I tried to subdue the other students the same way. Sometimes it worked. But I was still learning how to use my powers. Once, a classmate threw a punch that broke several of my ribs. I feigned illness and hid in my room for two weeks, humiliated. I was depressed. I realized then that I had to get out of Adachi before one of my classmates accidentally killed me—or worse, revealed what I was to the world.”

Kenzo grimaces.

“The next time I visited home,” he continues, “I knew I had to find a way to escape for good. Finally, I compelled one of father’s colleagues to grant me a prestigious position in the Dragon military—a strategic, noncombat role where I could fight with my head, not my fists.

They pulled me out of school immediately, and I never went back.

My life was set from there. Until our wedding day. ”

Warmth creeps into Eunji’s cheeks; I feel a blot of embarrassment curdle inside her.

“That moment at the altar, when we locked eyes, Eunji—I recognized the same fear I felt that day echoing inside you. I’m sorry—I think our emotions might have bounced off each other—compounded within you, perhaps—and then…”

“Then I ran,” Eunji mutters.

Kenzo nods. “And now we’re here.”

Jin applauds slowly.

“Riveting,” she drawls. “You’re both terrible people. I’m so glad you found one another.”

Kenzo falls quiet.

I’ve listened to all this in silence. I never knew much about Kenzo Kobayashi. Only that he was rich, well connected, and engaged to Eunji, and that she really wasn’t looking forward to it at the time.

But I didn’t know he was such a coward.

Knowing that he intentionally took the Tiger spirit to be murdered…

Part of me wants to tear Eunji aside and tell her that Kenzo is bad news. He can’t have been a good influence. And if I’m honest, I just don’t like him. He’s entitled, beyond arrogant, seeping with self-loathing.

But I can also see the conflicted feelings inside Eunji when she looks at him.

My stomach churns.

We continue marching up the mountain in silence. As the minutes stretch onward, the sunlight begins to melt away. A purple twilight descends around us rapidly as the sun sets.

Then, as the evening darkens, as we continue walking up the path, a strange, white fog begins to settle around us.

The mist lies down thinly at first, then thickly, becoming so dense in the air it’s impossible to see more than a meter ahead. We have to slow down our marching up the switchbacks as the fog grows so heavy that I can’t see a thing.

I pause. The tiger growls suddenly—

“Watch out!”

I pull Eunji back as she nearly steps off the edge of the mountain, slamming her into my chest. She gasps, looking down. Beneath her, where she almost placed her foot, the cliff descends into blackness.

She almost just fell to her death.

I exhale carefully, my warm breath suddenly so close to the back of her neck. Eunji blushes and inhales deeply a second time, twisting to look back at me.

A spray of invisible yellow sparks suddenly illuminates the distance between us—or lack thereof.

I’m not entirely sure which one of us they’re coming from.

I lift my hand off Eunji’s arm just as she lightly shoves me away, shooting me a scathing look, as if I didn’t just save her life. The sparks fade away.

“Maybe we should stop for a while,” I mutter. “We can’t see a thing. It’ll be easier to make it up the mountain when this fog fades.”

Jin glances at the tiger, who lowers her hind legs and bows her head, as if in agreement.

“No one else can enter through the gate, anyway. We’re safe here,” I add.

Eunji shivers, staring down at the black cliff face.

The four of us nestle into a nook at the edge of the mountain, fronted by a small patch of grass. Thankfully there’s enough of a ledge here for all of us to lie down comfortably.

I glance back at Eunji and Kenzo. The Dragon scion with the Tiger powers is impossible to read as he stares over at the tiger, emotionless, his face glowing ivory white under the eerie fog.

The tiger herself curls up by the edge of the mountain, pressing her body as close as she can to the crag, as the haunting mist continues to swirl around us forebodingly.